What is it about cats? Why do they lend themselves to fiction so easily? There have been numerous anthologies of cat stories, several of them multi-volume series. There is no other animal about which writers from all genres seem to be obsessed. Mystery, horror, science fiction, and fantasy stories have been written about cats.

It’s possible that felines, thought to be domesticated by happenstance rather than intent, are considered more mysterious, and thus more interesting to write about than other animals. Canines are pretty up front about their feelings—they’re considered to be loyal, obedient, and cheerful. Dogs, the oldest domesticated animal, have anthropomorphized themselves—become more like people. Cats have done very little of that. They are still strangers in the house. The cat does what it wants and goes its own way, which conjures up the darker images of willfulness, self-interest, and mystery.

It’s said that one is a dog person or a cat person. I’ve been both. I grew up with a wonderful cocker spaniel I adored and took “exploring” in the suburban woods across from where I lived. I don’t recall seeing many cats. All I knew of these mysterious creatures was that they chased and ate mice in the weird, silent, black and white, very primitive “Farmer Grey” cartoons of my childhood, and that my aunt living in West Germany would write regular letters to me reporting on her cat’s antics. It, and as a result she, were always in trouble with the neighbors for its skill at killing birds.

It wasn’t until I moved to Manhattan that I acquired (through a roommate) my first cat. The roommate moved in, immediately brought home two kittens, and then fled Manhattan after a couple of months, leaving me with one kitten because her parents wouldn’t let her take both back to Ann Arbor. I was suddenly a cat owner, soon acquiring a second, older cat (who lived to be twenty-three plus), and was soon faced with my own dead or dying birds—a roof adjoining my apartment allowed my cats limited roaming area.

Since then I’ve always owned cats. Or have they owned me?

The stories herein are culled from anthologies, magazines, and collections, most published from 1980–2009, a few (such as the Lewis Carroll excerpt and the John Crowley and Stephen King stories) in the late 70s. There are stories in which cats are the heroes and some in which they’re the villains. There are domestic cats, tigers, lions, mythical part-cat beings, people transformed into cats, and cats transformed into people. There’s science fiction, fantasy, mystery, horror, and even one mainstream cat story. And yes, a few cute cats.

This is not my first cat anthology. I edited Twists of the Tale in 1996—it consisted of mostly original horror stories, three of them reprinted in this book.

One thing was certain, that the white kitten had had nothing to do with it—it was the black kitten’s fault entirely. For the white kitten had been having its face washed by the old cat for the last quarter of an hour (and bearing it pretty well, considering); so you see that it couldn’t have had any hand in the mischief.

The way Dinah washed her children’s faces was this: first she held the poor thing down by its ear with one paw, and then with the other paw she rubbed its face all over, the wrong way, beginning at the nose; and just now, as I said, she was hard at work on the white kitten, which was lying quite still and trying to purr—no doubt feeling that it was all meant for its good.

But the black kitten had been finished with earlier in the afternoon, and so, while Alice was sitting curled up in a corner of the great armchair, half talking to herself and half asleep, the kitten had been having a grand game of romps with the ball of worsted Alice had been trying to wind up, and had been rolling it up and down till it had all come undone again; and there it was, spread over the hearth-rug, all knots and tangles, with the kitten running after its own tail in the middle.

“Oh, you wicked little thing!” cried Alice, catching up the kitten, and giving it a little kiss to make it understand that it was in disgrace. “Really, Dinah ought to have taught you better manners! You ought, Dinah, you know you ought!” she added, looking reproachfully at the old cat, and speaking in as cross a voice as she could manage—and then she scrambled back into the armchair, taking the kitten and the worsted with her, and began winding up the ball again. But she didn’t get on very fast, as she was talking all the time, sometimes to the kitten, and sometimes to herself. Kitty sat very demurely on her knee, pretending to watch the progress of the winding, and now and then putting out one paw and gently touching the ball, as if it would be glad to help, if it might.

“Do you know what to-morrow is, Kitty?” Alice began. “You’d have guessed if you’d been up in the window with me—only Dinah was making you tidy, so you couldn’t. I was watching the boys getting in sticks for the bonfire—and it wants plenty of sticks, Kitty! Only it got so cold, and it snowed so, they had to leave off. Never mind, Kitty, we’ll go and see the bonfire to-morrow.” Here Alice wound two or three turns of the worsted round the kitten’s neck, just to see how it would look; this led to a scramble, in which the ball rolled down upon the floor, and yards and yards of it got unwound again.

“Do you know, I was so angry, Kitty,” Alice went on as soon as they were comfortably settled again, “when I saw all the mischief you had been doing, I was very nearly opening the window, and putting you out into the snow! And you’d have deserved it, you little mischievous darling! What have you got to say for yourself? Now don’t interrupt me!” she went on, holding up one finger. “I’m going to tell you all your faults. Number one: you squeaked twice while Dinah was washing your face this morning. Now you can’t deny it, Kitty, I heard you! What’s that you say?” (pretending that the kitten was speaking.) “Her paw went into your eye? Well, that’s your fault, for keeping your eyes open—if you’d shut them tight up, it wouldn’t have happened. Now don’t make any more excuses, but listen! Number two: you pulled Snowdrop away by the tail just as I had put down the saucer of milk before her! What, you were thirsty, were you? How do you know she wasn’t thirsty too? Now for number three: you unwound every bit of the worsted while I wasn’t looking!

“That’s three faults, Kitty, and you’ve not been punished for any of them yet. You know I’m saving up all your punishments for Wednesday week—Suppose they had saved up all my punishments!” she went on, talking more to herself than the kitten. “What would they do at the end of a year? I should be sent to prison, I suppose, when the day came. Or—let me see—suppose each punishment was to be going without a dinner: then, when the miserable day came, I should have to go without fifty dinners at once! Well, I shouldn’t mind that much! I’d far rather go without them than eat them!

“Do you hear the snow against the window-panes, Kitty? How nice and soft it sounds! Just as if someone was kissing the window all over outside. I wonder if the snow loves the trees and fields, that it kisses them so gently? And then it covers them up snug, you know, with a white quilt; and perhaps it says, ‘Go to sleep, darlings, till the summer comes again.’ And when they wake up in the summer, Kitty, they dress themselves all in green, and dance about—whenever the wind blows—oh, that’s very pretty!” cried Alice, dropping the ball of worsted to clap her hands. “And I do so wish it was true! I’m sure the woods look sleepy in the autumn, when the leaves are getting brown.

“Kitty, can you play chess? Now, don’t smile, my dear, I’m asking it seriously. Because, when we were playing just now, you watched just as if you understood it: and when I said ‘Check!’ you purred! Well, it was a nice check, Kitty, and really I might have won, if it hadn’t been for that nasty Knight, that came wiggling down among my pieces. Kitty, dear, let’s pretend—” And here I wish I could tell you half the things Alice used to say, beginning with her favourite phrase “Let’s pretend.” She had had quite a long argument with her sister only the day before—all because Alice had begun with “Let’s pretend we’re kings and queens;” and her sister, who liked being very exact, had argued that they couldn’t, because there were only two of them, and Alice had been reduced at last to say, “Well, you can be one of them then, and I’ll be all the rest.” And once she had really frightened her old nurse by shouting suddenly in her ear, “Nurse! Do let’s pretend that I’m a hungry hyaena, and you’re a bone.”

But this is taking us away from Alice’s speech to the kitten. “Let’s pretend that you’re the Red Queen, Kitty! Do you know, I think if you sat up and folded your arms, you’d look exactly like her. Now do try, there’s a dear!” And Alice got the Red Queen off the table, and set it up before the kitten as a model for it to imitate; however, the thing didn’t succeed, principally, Alice said, because the kitten wouldn’t fold its arms properly. So, to punish it, she held it up to the Looking-glass, that it might see how sulky it was—“and if you’re not good directly,” she added, “I’ll put you through into Looking-glass House. How would you like that?”

“Now, if you’ll only attend, Kitty, and not talk so much, I’ll tell you all my ideas about Looking-glass House. First, there’s the room you can see through the glass—that’s just the same as our drawing room, only the things go the other way. I can see all of it when I get upon a chair—all but the bit behind the fireplace. Oh! I do so wish I could see that bit! I want so much to know whether they’ve a fire in the winter; you never can tell, you know, unless our fire smokes, and then smoke comes up in that room too—but that may be only pretence, just to make it look as if they had a fire. Well then, the books are something like our books, only the words go the wrong way; I know that, because I’ve held up one of our books to the glass, and then they hold up one in the other room.

“How would you like to live in Looking-glass House, Kitty? I wonder if they’d give you milk in there? Perhaps Looking-glass milk isn’t good to drink—But oh, Kitty! now we come to the passage. You can just see a little peep of the passage in Looking-glass House, if you leave the door of our drawing-room wide open; and it’s very like our passage as far as you can see, only you know it may be quite different on beyond. Oh, Kitty! how nice it would be if we could only get through into Looking-glass House! I’m sure it’s got, oh! such beautiful things in it! Let’s pretend there’s a way of getting through into it, somehow, Kitty. Let’s pretend the glass has got all soft like gauze, so that we can get through. Why, it’s turning into a sort of mist now, I declare! It’ll be easy enough to get through—” She was up on the chimney-piece while she said this, though she hardly knew how she had got there. And certainly the glass was beginning to melt away, just like a bright, silvery mist.

Not too long ago, it wasn’t too uncommon for someone driving down Little Egypt way, where southern Illinois merges into Kentucky close to the Cumberland River, to see oh, maybe five-six Katz’s Chewing Tobacco barn advertisements within a three- or four-hour drive; in his prime, Hobart Gurney was a busy man. Now, if a person wants to see Gurney’s handiwork, they have to drive or fly out to New York City, or—if they’re lucky—catch one of the traveling exhibitions of his work. If the exhibitors can get insurance—after all, Gurney was sort of the Jackson Pollock of the barn-art world; he worked with what paints he had, with an eye toward getting the job done fast and getting his pay even quicker once he was finished, so those cut-out chunks of barn wall need to be babied like they were fashioned out of spun sugar and spider webs—and not just flaking paint on sometimes-rotting planks. Someone once told me that the surviving Katz’s barn signs had to be treated with the same sort of preservation methods as the relics unearthed from Egyptian tombs—now that would’ve tickled old Hobart Gurney’s fancy, as he might’ve put it.

Oh, not so much the preservation part, but the Egyptian aspect of it all, for Gurney did far more than paint Katz’s Chewing Tobacco signs for a living (not to mention for a good part of his life, period); he lived for his “Katz’s cats.”

Died for them, too. But that’s another story… one you won’t read about in any of those books filled with photographs of Gurney’s barn signs, or hear about on those PBS or Arts & Entertainment specials on his life and work. But the story rivals any ever told about the cat-worshiping Egyptians… especially since Hobart knew his cats weren’t gods but loved them anyhow. And because they loved him back….

Tramps and vagabonds have marks they make on gateposts and trees and doors, letting others of their kind know a little about the people who live at the houses and farms they pass on their travels. I think cats must leave similar signs; how else to explain the cats who turn up at our door through the year, hungry and flea-ridden and abandoned?

We take them in. We get rid of the fleas and the ticks, feed them and take them to the vet. We pay for them to get their shots, and, indignity upon indignity, we have them neutered or spayed.

And they stay with us, for a few months, or for a year, or for ever.

Most of them arrive in summer. We live in the country, just the right distance out of town for the city-dwellers to abandon their cats near us.

We never seem to have more than eight cats, rarely have less than three. The cat population of my house is currently as follows: Hermione and Pod, tabby and black respectively, the mad sisters who live in my attic office, and do not mingle; Princess, the blue-eyed long-haired white cat, who lived wild in the woods for years before she gave up her wild ways for soft sofas and beds; and, last but largest, Furball, Princess’s cushion-like calico long-haired daughter, orange and black and white, whom I discovered as a tiny kitten in our garage one day, strangled and almost dead, her head poked through an old badminton net, and who surprised us all by not dying but instead growing up to be the best-natured cat I have ever encountered.

And then there is the black cat. Who has no other name than the Black Cat, and who turned up almost a month ago. We did not realize he was going to be living here at first: he looked too well-fed to be a stray, too old and jaunty to have been abandoned. He looked like a small panther, and he moved like a patch of night.

One day, in the summer, he was lurking about our ramshackle porch: eight or nine years old, at a guess, male, greenish-yellow of eye, very friendly, quite unperturbable. I assumed he belonged to a neighboring farmer or household.

I went away for a few weeks, to finish writing a book, and when I came home he was still on our porch, living in an old cat-bed one of the children had found for him. He was, however, almost unrecognizable. Patches of fur had gone, and there were deep scratches on his grey skin. The tip of one ear was chewed away. There was a gash beneath one eye, a slice gone from one lip. He looked tired and thin.

We took the Black Cat to the vet, where we got him some antibiotics, which we fed him each night, along with soft cat food.

We wondered who he was fighting. Princess, our white, beautiful, near-feral queen? Raccoons? A rat-tailed, fanged possum?

Each night the scratches would be worse—one night his side would be chewed-up; the next, it would be his underbelly, raked with claw marks and bloody to the touch.

When it got to that point, I took him down to the basement to recover, beside the furnace and the piles of boxes. He was surprisingly heavy, the Black Cat, and I picked him up and carried him down there, with a cat-basket, and a litter bin, and some food and water. I closed the door behind me. I had to wash the blood from my hands, when I left the basement.

He stayed down there for four days. At first he seemed too weak to feed himself: a cut beneath one eye had rendered him almost one-eyed, and he limped and lolled weakly, thick yellow pus oozing from the cut in his lip.

I went down there every morning and every night, and I fed him, and gave him antibiotics, which I mixed with his canned food, and I dabbed at the worst of the cuts, and spoke to him. He had diarrhea, and, although I changed his litter daily, the basement stank evilly.

The four days that the Black Cat lived in the basement were a bad four days in my house: the baby slipped in the bath, and banged her head, and might have drowned; I learned that a project I had set my heart on—adapting Hope Mirrlees’ novel Lud in the Mist for the BBC—was no longer going to happen, and I realized that I did not have the energy to begin again from scratch, pitching it to other networks, or to other media; my daughter left for Summer Camp, and immediately began to send home a plethora of heart-tearing letters and cards, five or six each day, imploring us to take her away; my son had some kind of fight with his best friend, to the point that they were no longer on speaking terms; and returning home one night, my wife hit a deer, who ran out in front of the car. The deer was killed, the car was left undriveable, and my wife sustained a small cut over one eye.

By the fourth day, the cat was prowling the basement, walking haltingly but impatiently between the stacks of books and comics, the boxes of mail and cassettes, of pictures and of gifts and of stuff. He mewed at me to let him out and, reluctantly, I did so.

He went back onto the porch, and slept there for the rest of the day.

The next morning there were deep, new gashes in his flanks, and clumps of black cat hair—his—covered the wooden boards of the porch.

Letters arrived that day from my daughter, telling us that Camp was going better, and she thought she could survive a few days; my son and his friend sorted out their problem, although what the argument was about—trading cards, computer games, Star Wars or a Girl—I would never learn. The BBC Executive who had vetoed Lud in the Mist was discovered to have been taking bribes (well, “questionable loans”) from an independent production company, and was sent home on permanent leave: his successor, I was delighted to learn, when she faxed me, was the woman who had initially proposed the project to me before leaving the BBC.

I thought about returning the Black Cat to the basement, but decided against it. Instead, I resolved to try and discover what kind of animal was coming to our house each night, and from there to formulate a plan of action—to trap it, perhaps.

For birthdays and at Christmas my family gives me gadgets and gizmos, pricy toys which excite my fancy but, ultimately, rarely leave their boxes. There is a food dehydrator and an electric carving knife, a bread-making machine, and, last year’s present, a pair of see-in-the-dark binoculars. On Christmas Day I had put the batteries into the binoculars, and had walked about the basement in the dark, too impatient even to wait until nightfall, stalking a flock of imaginary Starlings. (You were warned not to turn it on in the light: that would have damaged the binoculars, and quite possibly your eyes as well.) Afterwards I had put the device back into its box, and it sat there still, in my office, beside the box of computer cables and forgotten bits and pieces.

Perhaps, I thought, if the creature, dog or cat or raccoon or what-have-you, were to see me sitting on the porch, it would not come, so I took a chair into the box-and-coat-room, little larger than a closet, which overlooks the porch, and, when everyone in the house was asleep, I went out onto the porch, and bade the Black Cat goodnight.

That cat, my wife had said, when he first arrived, is a person. And there was something very person-like in his huge, leonine face: his broad black nose, his greenish-yellow eyes, his fanged but amiable mouth (still leaking amber pus from the right lower lip).

I stroked his head, and scratched him beneath the chin, and wished him well. Then I went inside, and turned off the light on the porch.

I sat on my chair, in the darkness inside the house, with the see-in-the-dark binoculars on my lap. I had switched the binoculars on, and a trickle of greenish light came from the eyepieces.

Time passed, in the darkness.

I experimented with looking at the darkness with the binoculars, learning to focus, to see the world in shades of green. I found myself horrified by the number of swarming insects I could see in the night air: it was as if the night world were some kind of nightmarish soup, swimming with life. Then I lowered the binoculars from my eyes, and stared out at the rich blacks and blues of the night, empty and peaceful and calm.

Time passed. I struggled to keep awake, found myself profoundly missing cigarettes and coffee, my two lost addictions. Either of them would have kept my eyes open. But before I had tumbled too far into the world of sleep and dreams a yowl from the garden jerked me fully awake. I fumbled the binoculars to my eyes, and was disappointed to see that it was merely Princess, the white cat, streaking across the front garden like a patch of greenish-white light. She vanished into the woodland to the left of the house, and was gone.

I was about to settle myself back down, when it occurred to me to wonder what exactly had startled Princess so, and I began scanning the middle distance with the binoculars, looking for a huge raccoon, a dog, or a vicious possum. And there was indeed something coming down the driveway, towards the house. I could see it through the binoculars, clear as day.

It was the Devil.

I had never seen the Devil before, and, although I had written about him in the past, if pressed would have confessed that I had no belief in him, other than as an imaginary figure, tragic and Miltonion. The figure coming up the driveway was not Milton’s Lucifer. It was the Devil.

My heart began to pound in my chest, to pound so hard that it hurt. I hoped it could not see me, that, in a dark house, behind window-glass, I was hidden.

The figure flickered and changed as it walked up the drive. One moment it was dark, bull-like, minotaurish, the next it was slim and female, and the next it was a cat itself, a scarred, huge grey-green wildcat, its face contorted with hate.

There are steps that lead up to my porch, four white wooden steps in need of a coat of paint (I knew they were white, although they were, like everything else, green through my binoculars). At the bottom of the steps, the Devil stopped, and called out something that I could not understand, three, perhaps four words in a whining, howling language that must have been old and forgotten when Babylon was young; and, although I did not understand the words, I felt the hairs raise on the back of my head as it called.

And then I heard, muffled through the glass, but still audible, a low growl, a challenge, and, slowly, unsteadily, a black figure walked down the steps of the house, away from me, toward the Devil. These days the Black Cat no longer moved like a panther, instead he stumbled and rocked, like a sailor only recently returned to land.

The Devil was a woman, now. She said something soothing and gentle to the cat, in a tongue that sounded like French, and reached out a hand to him. He sank his teeth into her arm, and her lip curled, and she spat at him.

The woman glanced up at me, then, and if I had doubted that she was the Devil before, I was certain of it now: the woman’s eyes flashed red fire at me; but you can see no red through the night-vision binoculars, only shades of a green. And the Devil saw me, through the window. It saw me. I am in no doubt about that at all.

The Devil twisted and writhed, and now it was some kind of jackal, a flat-faced, huge-headed, bull-necked creature, halfway between a hyena and a dingo. There were maggots squirming in its mangy fur, and it began to walk up the steps.

The Black Cat leapt upon it, and in seconds they became a rolling, writhing thing, moving faster than my eyes could follow.

All this in silence.

And then a low roar—down the country road at the bottom of our drive, in the distance, lumbered a late-night truck, its blazing headlights burning bright as green suns through the binoculars. I lowered them from my eyes, and saw only darkness, and the gentle yellow of headlights, and then the red of rear lights as it vanished off again into the nowhere at all.

When I raised the binoculars once more there was nothing to be seen. Only the Black Cat, on the steps, staring up into the air. I trained the binoculars up, and saw something flying away—a vulture, perhaps, or an eagle—and then it flew beyond the trees and was gone.

I went out onto the porch, and picked up the Black Cat, and stroked him, and said kind, soothing things to him. He mewled piteously when I first approached him, but, after a while, he went to sleep on my lap, and I put him into his basket, and went upstairs to my bed, to sleep myself. There was dried blood on my tee shirt and jeans, the following morning.

That was a week ago.

The thing that comes to my house does not come every night. But it comes most nights: we know it by the wounds on the cat, and the pain I can see in those leonine eyes. He has lost the use of his front left paw, and his right eye has closed for good.

I wonder what we did to deserve the Black Cat. I wonder who sent him. And, selfish and scared, I wonder how much more he has to give.

I’ve just finished cleaning the vomit my last fare left in the back seat—his idea of a tip, I guess, since he actually short-changed me a couple of bucks—and I’m back cruising when the woman flags me down on Gracie Street, outside one of those girl-on-girl clubs. I’ll tell you, I’m as open-minded as the next guy, but it breaks my heart when I see a looker like this playing for the other team. She’s enough to give me sweet dreams for the rest of the week, and this is only Monday night.

She’s about five-seven or five-eight and dark-skinned—Hispanic, maybe, or Indian. I can’t tell. I just know she’s gorgeous. Jet black hair hanging straight down her back and she’s all decked out in net stockings, spike heels, and a short black dress that looks like it’s been sprayed on and glistens like satin. Somehow she manages to pull it off without looking like a hooker. It’s got to be her babydoll face—made up to a T, but so innocent all you want to do is keep her safe and take care of her. After you’ve slept with her, mind.

I watch her in the rearview mirror as she gets into the backseat—showing plenty of leg with that short dress of hers and not shy about my seeing it. We both know that’s all I’m getting and I’m lucky to get that much. She wrinkles her nose and I can’t tell if it’s some linger of l’eau de puke or the Lysol I sprayed on the seat after I cleaned up the mess my last fare left behind.

Hell, maybe it’s me.

“What can I do for you, ma’am?” I ask.

She’s got these big, dark eyes and they fix on mine in the rearview mirror, just holding on to my gaze like we’re the only two people in the world.

“How far are you willing to go?” she asks.

Dressed like she is, you’d be forgiven for thinking it was a come-on. Hell, that was my first thought anyway, doesn’t matter she’s playing on that other team. But there’s that cherub innocence thing she’s got going for her and, well, take a look at a pug like me and you know the one thing that isn’t going to happen is some pretty girl’s going to make a play for me from the back seat of my cab.

“I can take you any place you need to go,” I tell her, playing it safe.

“And if I need something else?” she asks.

I shake my head. “I don’t deal with anything that might put me inside.”

I almost said “back inside,” but that’s not something she needs to know. Though maybe she already does. Maybe when I pulled over she saw the prison tattoos on my arms—you know, you put them on with a pin and the ink from a ballpoint so they always come out looking kind of scratchy and blue.

“Someone has stolen my cat,” she says. “I was hoping you might help me get her back.”

I turn right around in my seat to look at her straight on. I decide she’s Hispanic from her accent. I like the Spanish warmth it puts on her words.

“Your cat,” I say. “You mean like a pet?”

“Something like that. I really do need someone to help me steal her back.”

I laugh. I can’t help it.

“So what, you flag down the first cab you see and figure whoever’s driving it’ll take a short break from cruising for fares to help you creep some joint?”

“Creep?” she asks.

“Break in. But quietly, you know, because you’re hoping you won’t get caught.”

She shakes her head.

“No,” she says. “I just thought you might.”

“And that would be because…?”

“You’ve got kind eyes.”

People have said a lot of things about me over the years, but that’s something I’ve never heard before. It’s like telling a wolf he’s got a nice smile. I’ve been told I’ve got dead eyes, or a hard stare, but no one’s ever had anything nice to say about them before. I don’t know if it’s because of that, or if it’s because of that innocence she carries that just makes you want to take care of her, but I find myself nodding.

“Sure,” I tell her. “Why not? It’s a slow night. Where can we find this cat of yours?”

“First I need to go home and get changed,” she says. “I can’t go—what was the word you used?” She smiles. “Creep a house wearing this.”

Well, she could, I think, and it would sure make it interesting for me if I was hoisting her up to a window, but I just nod again.

“No problem,” I tell her. “Where do you live?”

Sometimes when we’re in a car, driving country roads in autumn, I see sparse poppies splashed in among the grasses and it makes me want to cut my throat and let the blood spill out of the window to make more poppies, many more, until the roadside is a blaze of red.

Instead I light a cigarette and watch the road, and in a while the poppies will be behind us, as they always are.

On the morning of 10th October I was in a state of reasonably high excitement. I was at home, and I was supposed to be working. What I was mainly doing, however, was sitting thrumming at my desk, leaping to my feet whenever I heard the sound of traffic outside the window. When I wasn’t doing that I was peeking at the two large cardboard boxes that were sitting in the middle of the floor.

The two large boxes contained, respectively, a new computer and a new monitor. After a year or so of containing my natural wirehead need to own the brightest and best in high-specification consumer goods, I’d finally succumbed and upgraded my machine. Credit card in hand, I’d picked up the phone and ordered myself a piece of science fiction, in the shape of a computer that not only went like a train but also had built-in telecommunications and speech recognition. The future was finally here, and sitting on my living room floor.

However.

While I had £3000 worth of Mac and monitor, what I didn’t have was the £15 cable that connected the two together. The manufacturer, it transpired, felt it constituted an optional extra despite the fact that without it the two system components were little more than bulky white ornaments of a particularly tantalizing and frustrating kind. The cable had to be ordered separately, and there weren’t any in the country at the moment. They were all in Belgium.

I was only told this a week after I ordered the system, and I strove to make my feelings on the matter clear to my supplier, during the further week in which they playfully promised to deliver the system first on one day, then another, all such promises evaporating like the morning dew. The two boxes had finally made it to my door the day before and, by a bizarre coincidence, the cables had today crawled tired and overwrought into the supplier’s warehouse. My contact at Callhaven Direct knew just how firmly one of those cables had my name on it and had phoned to grudgingly admit they were available. I’d immediately called my courier firm, which I occasionally used to send design roughs to clients. Callhaven had offered, but I somehow sensed that they wouldn’t quite get round to it today, and I’d waited long enough. The bike firm I used specializes in riders who look as if they’ve been chucked out of the Hell’s Angels for being too tough. A large man in leathers turning up in Callhaven’s offices, with instructions not to leave without my cable, was just the sort of incentive I felt they needed. And so I was waiting, drinking endless cups of coffee, for such a person to arrive at the flat, brandishing said component above his head in triumph.

When the buzzer finally went I nearly fell off my chair. The entry phone in our building was fashioned with waking the dead in mind, and I swear the walls vibrate. Without bothering to check who it was I left the flat and pounded down the stairs to the front door, swinging it open with, I suspect, a look of joy upon my face. I get a lot of pleasure out of technology. It’s a bit sad, I know—God knows Nancy has told me so often enough—but hell, it’s my life.

Standing on the step was a leather convention, topped with a shining black helmet. The biker was a lot slighter than their usual type, but quite tall. Tall enough to have done the job, evidently.

“Bloody marvelous,” I said. “Is that a cable?”

“Sure is,” the biker said indistinctly. A hand raised the visor on the helmet, and I saw with some surprise that it was a woman. “They didn’t seem too keen to let it go.”

I laughed and took the package from her. Sure enough, it said AV adapter cable on the outside.

“You’ve made my day,” I said a little wildly, “and I’m more than tempted to kiss you.”

“That seems rather forward,” the girl said, reaching up to her helmet. “But a cup of coffee would be nice. I’ve been driving since five this morning and my tongue feels like it’s made of brick.”

Slightly taken aback, I hesitated for a moment. I’d never had a motorcycle courier in for tea before. Also, it meant a delay before I could ravage through the boxes and start connecting things up. But it was still only eleven in the morning, and another fifteen minutes wouldn’t harm. I was also, I guess, a little pleased at the thought of such an unusual encounter.

“You would be,” I said with Arthurian courtliness, “most welcome.”

“Thank you, kind sir,” the courier said, and pulled her helmet off. A great deal of dark brown hair spilled out around her face, and she swung her head to clear it. Her face was strong, with a wide mouth and vivid green eyes that had a smile already in them. The morning sun caught chestnut gleams in her hair as she stood with extraordinary grace on the doorstep. Bloody hell, I thought, the cable unregarded in my hand. Then I stood to one side to let her into the house.

Your face, I say, is a wild animal this morning, Lucy, and I’m glad it’s caged. Her scowl is so deep I can’t imagine she’s ever been without it. Her yellow hair is a frumpy halo around her wire mask. My remark doesn’t amuse her.

I know what I did. I just don’t know why it pissed her off, and if I don’t know, insensitive bastard that I am, she certainly isn’t going to tell me.

She lifts the cat over her head and hurls it at me. Hurls it hard. I catch it and underhand it back to her. The cat is gray on top and snowy white below and mostly limp, its eyes rolled back in its head and its coated tongue hanging loose out of one side of its mouth. I know from experience that it will die soon, and its alarm collar will go off, and one of us will toss it into the ditch that runs between us. A fresh angry bundle of teeth and claws will drop from the hatch in the ceiling, and we’ll toss the new cat back and forth between us until our staggered breaks and someone takes our places. The idea is to keep the animals in motion twenty-four hours a day.

In this profession, we wear canvas shirts and gloves and wire cages over our faces. I sometimes dream we’ve lost our jobs, Lucy and me. What a nightmare. What else do we know?

My replacement comes in behind me. He takes up the straw broom and dips it into the water in the ditch that runs through the toss-box and sweeps at the smeared feces and urine staining the floor and walls. A moment later, the buzzer sounds, and he puts the broom back in the corner. I step aside, and Lucy tosses the cat to him. I slip out of the box and into the catacomb for my fifteen-minute break before moving on to the next box.

Lucy and I work an hour on and fifteen minutes off all day long. As we move from toss-box to toss-box, our paths cross and recross. I’ll be out of phase with her for half an hour, probably just long enough for her to work up a real rage.

The catacomb is a labyrinth of wide tunnels dotted with concrete boxes. There is a metal chute running from the roof to the top of each box. The boxes are evenly spaced, and there is a light bulb for every box, but not all the bulbs are alive so there are gaps in the harsh light. The boxes are small rooms, and there is a wooden door on each side so catchers can be replaced without interrupting the tossing. The concrete walls of the tunnels, like the concrete walls of the boxes, are streaked black and white and beaded with moisture. The floors are roughened concrete. Everything smells like wet rocks and dead things.

So what did I do?

While Lucy dressed for work this morning, I played with our infant daughter, Megan, tossing her into the air and catching her again, blowing bubbles into her stomach while she pulled my hair and giggled until she got the hiccups.

When Lucy came in, I tossed the baby in a high arc across the room to her. Megan tumbled in a perfect backward somersault in the air. Lucy went dead white. She snatched Megan out of the air and hugged the child to her chest.

“Nice catch,” I said.

“Don’t you ever,” Lucy said, her voice all husky and dangerous, “ever do that again, Desmond! Not ever.”

Then she stomped out, taking Megan with her.

What the hell? I’d known there was no chance whatever that Lucy would miss. She’s a professional. My trusting her to catch the love of my life, the apple of my eye, Daddy’s little girl, was, I thought, a pretty big compliment. Lucy didn’t buy it. In fact, she didn’t even let me explain at all, said instead, oh shut up, Desmond, just shut up, and off we went to work, silent, stewing, our hurt feelings like a sack of broken toys between us.

Now she’s not speaking to me. It’s going to be a long day.

The buzzer sounds, and I move into the next box. I do my duty with the broom, and when the buzzer sounds again I replace the catcher. The cat here is a howling orange monster, and I have my hands full. When the animal is this fresh, the tossing technique looks a lot like volleyball. You don’t want to be too close to the thing for very long.

By the time Lucy takes her place across from me, I’ve established a rhythm and am even able to put a little spin on the cat now and then. I have to hand it to Lucy. She catches up quickly, and soon we have the animal sailing smoothly between us.

The animals go through stages as we toss and catch them. First defiance, then resistance, followed by resignation, then despair, and finally death. This one is probably somewhere in the resistance stage, not fighting wildly, but watching for an opening to do some damage. I put one hand on the cat’s chest and the other under its bottom and send it across to Lucy in a sitting position. Not to be outdone she sends it back still sitting but upside down now. Maybe the silly positions have done the trick. Whatever. I can feel the animal slip into the resignation stage.

I toss the cat tumbling head over heels, a weak howl and a loose string of saliva trailing behind it. Is Lucy ever going to talk to me again?

“Okay, I’m sorry,” I say, giving in to the idea that I might never know exactly why I should be sorry.

I see tears come to her eyes, and she falters, nearly drops the cat. I want to go to her. I want to comfort her, but it will be some time before we’re both on a break at the same time, and I see suddenly that it will be too late by then. It simply won’t matter anymore.

My replacement comes in and sweeps up. Then the buzzer sounds. I step aside.

Lucy isn’t crying anymore.

I reach for the door.

The first reports of the creature, mere sightings, were absurd—a confusion of parts; a loss of words to describe the smile. The color, they said, was a flame, a hot coal, a flower, and each of the witnesses tried to mimic the thing’s song but none could. My master, the wizard Watkin, bade me record in word and image every thing each one said. We’d been put to it by the king, whose comment was, “Give an ear to their drollery. Make them think you’re thinking about it at my command. It’s naught but bad air, my old friend.” My master nodded and smiled, but after the king had left the room, the wizard turned to me and whispered, “Manticore.”

“It’s the last one, no doubt,” said Watkin. We watched from the balcony in late afternoon when the king’s hunters returned from the forest across the wide green lawn to the palace, the blood of the Manticore’s victims trailing bright red through the grass. “It’s a very old one,” he said. “You can tell by the fact that it devours the horses but the humans often return with a limb or two intact.” He cast a spell of protection around the monster, threading the eye of a needle with a hummingbird feather.

“You want it to survive?” I asked.

“To live till it dies naturally,” was his answer. “The king’s hunters must not kill it.”

Beneath the moon and stars at the edge of autumn, we sat with the rest of the court along the ramparts of the castle and listened for the creature’s flute-like trill, descending and ascending the scale, moving through the distant darkness of the trees. Its sound set the crystal goblets to vibrating. The ladies played hearts by candle light, their hair up and powdered. The gentlemen leaned back, smoking their pipes, discussing how they’d fell the beast if the job was theirs.

“Wizard,” the king said. “I thought you’d taken measures.”

“I did,” said Watkin. “It’s difficult, though. Magic against magic, and I’m an old man.”

A few moments later, the King’s engineer appeared at his side. The man carried a mechanical weapon that shot an arrow made of elephant ivory. “The tip is dipped in acid that will eat the creature’s flesh,” said the engineer. “Aim anywhere above the neck. Keep the gear work within the gun well-oiled.” His highness smiled and nodded.

A week later, just prior to dinner, at the daily ritual in which the king assessed the state of his kingdom, it was reported that the creature devoured two horses and a hunter, took the right leg of the engineer’s assistant and so twisted and crumpled the new weapon of the engineer that the poison arrow set to strike the beast turned round and stabbed its inventor in the ear, the lobe of which dripped off his head like a lit candle.

“We fear the thing may lay eggs,” said the engineer. “I suggest we burn the forest.”

“We’re not burning down the forest,” said the king. He turned and looked at the wizard. Watkin faked sleep.

I helped the old man out of his chair and accompanied him down the stone steps to the corridor that led to our chambers. Before I let him go, he took me by the collar and whispered, “The spell’s weakening, I can feel it in my gums.” I nodded, and he brushed me aside, walking the rest of the way to his rooms unassisted. Following behind, I looked over my shoulder almost positive the king was aware that his wizard’s art had been turned against him.

I lay down in my small space off the western side of the work room. I could see the inverted, hairless pink corpse of the hunch monkey swinging from the ceiling in the other room. The wizard had written away for it to Palgeria five years earlier, or so said his records. When it arrived, I could see by his reaction that he could no longer remember what he’d meant to do with it. Two days later, he came to me and said, “See what you can make of this hunch monkey.” I had no idea, so I hung the carcass in the work room.

From the first day of my service to Watkin he insisted that I tell him my dreams each morning. “Dreams are the manner in which those who mean you harm infiltrate the defenses of you existence,” he told me during a thunderstorm. It was mid-august, and we stood, dry, beneath the spreading branches of a hemlock one afternoon as a hard rain fell in curtains around us. That night, in sleep, I followed a woman through a field of purple flowers that eventually sloped down to the edge of a cliff. Below, an enormous mound of black rock heaved as if breathing, and when it expanded I could see through cracks and fissures red and orange light radiating out from within. The dream woman looked over her shoulder and said, “Do you remember the day you came to serve the wizard?”

Then the light was in my eyes and I was surprised to find I was awake. Watkin, holding a lantern up to my face said, “It’s perished. Come quickly.” He spun away from the bed, casting me in shadow again. I trembled as I dressed. I’d seen the old man pull, with his teeth, the spirit of a spitting demon from the nostril of one of the ladies of court. Unfathomable. His flowered robe was a brilliant design of peonies in the snow, but I no longer trusted the sun.

I stepped into the work room as Watkin was clearing things from the huge table at which he mixed his powders and dissected the reptiles whose small brains had a region that when mashed and dried quickened his potions. “Fetch your pen and paper,” he said. “We will record everything.” I did as I was told and then helped him. At one point he tried to lift a large crystal globe of blue powder and his thin wrists shook with the exertion. I took it from him just as it slipped from his fingers.

Suddenly, everywhere, the scent of roses and cinnamon. The wizard sniffed the air, and warned me that its arrival was imminent. Six hunters carried the corpse, draped across three battle stretchers, and covered by the frayed tapestry of the War of the Willows which had hung in the corridor that ran directly from the Treasury to the Pity Fountain. Watkin and I stood back as the dark bearded men grunted, gritted their teeth, and hoisted the stretchers onto the table. As they filed out of our chambers, my master handed each of them a small packet of powder tied up with a ribbon—an aphrodisiac, I suspected. Before collecting his reward and leaving, the last of the hunters took the edge of the tapestry, and lifting the corner high, walked swiftly around the table, unveiling the Manticore.

I glanced for a mere sliver and instinctually looked away. While my eyes were averted, I heard the old man purr, squeal, chitter. The thick cloud of the creature’s scent was a weight on my shoulders, and then I noticed the first buzz of the flies. The wizard slapped my face and forced me to look. His grip on the back of my neck could not be denied.

It was crimson and shades of crimson. And after I noted the color, I saw the teeth and looked at nothing else for a time. Both a wince and a smile. I saw the lion paws, the fur, the breasts, that long beautiful hair. The tail of shining segments led to a smooth, sharp stinger—a green bubble of venom at its tip. “Write this down,” said Watkin. I fumbled for my pen. “Female Manticore,” he said. I wrote at the top of the page.

The wizard took one step that seemed to last for minutes. Then he took another and another, until he was pacing slowly around the table, studying the creature from all sides. In his right hand he held the cane with the wizard’s head carved into the head of it. Its tip was not touching the floor. “Draw it,” he commanded. I set to the task, but this was a skill I was deficient at. Still, I drew it—the human head and torso, the powerful body of a lion, the tail of the scorpion. It turned out to be my best drawing, but it too was terrible.

“The first time I saw one of these,” Watkin said, “I was with my class as a boy. We’d gone on a walk to the lake, and we’d just passed through an orchard and onto a large meadow with yellow flowers. My teacher, a woman named Levu, with a mole beside her lip, pointed into the distance, one hand on my shoulder, and whispered, ‘A husband and wife Manticore, look.’ I saw them, blurs of crimson, grazing the low hanging fruit by the edge of the meadow. On our way back to town that evening, we heard their distinctive trill and then were attacked by two of them. They each had three rows of teeth chewing perfectly in sync. I watched them devour the teacher as she frantically confessed to me. While I prayed for her, the monsters recited poems in an exotic tongue and licked the blood from their lips.”

I wrote down all of what Watkin said, although I wasn’t sure it was to the point. He never looked me in the eye, but moved slowly, slowly, around the thing, lightly prodding it with his cane, squinting with one eye into the darkness of its recesses. “Do you see the face?” he asked me. I told him I did. “But for that fiendish smile, she’s beautiful,” he said. I tried to see her without the smile and what I saw in my mind was the smile without her. Suffice to say, her skin was crimson as was her fur, her eyes yellow diamonds. Her long hair had its own mind, deep red-violet whips at her command. And then that smile.

“She lived next to me, with hair as long as this but golden,” Watkin said, pointing. “I, a little younger than you, she a little older. Only once we went out together into the desert and climbed down into the dunes. Underground there, in the ruins, we saw the stone carved face of the hunch monkey. We lay down in front of it together, kissed, and went to sleep. Our parents and neighbors were looking for us. Late in the night while she slept, a wind blew through the pursed lips of the stone face, warning me of treachery and time. When she woke, she said in sleep she’d visited the ocean and gone fishing with a Manticore. The next time we kissed was at our wedding.”

“Draw that,” he shouted. I did my best, but didn’t know whether to depict the Manticore or the wizard with her at the beach. “One more thing about the smile,” he said. “It continually, perpetually grinds with the organic rotary mechanism of a well-lubricated jaw and three sets of teeth—even after death, in the grave, it masticates the pitch black.”

“Should I draw that?” I asked.

He’d begun walking. A few moments later, he said, “No.”

He laid down his cane on the edge of the table and took one of the paws in both his hands. “Look here at this claw,” he said. “How many heads do you think it’s taken off?” “Ten,” I said. “Ten thousand,” he said, dropping the paw and retrieving his cane. “How many will it take off now?” he asked. I didn’t answer. “The lion is fur, muscle, tendon, claw and speed, five important ingredients of the unfathomable. Once a king of Dreesha captured and tamed a brood of Manticore. He led them into battles on long, thousand link, iron chains. They cut through the forward ranks of the charging Igridots with the artful tenacity his royal highness reserves for only the largest pastries.”

“Take this down?” I asked.

“To the last dribbling vowel,” he said, nodding and slowly moving. His cane finally tapped the floor. “Supposedly,” he said, “there’s another smaller organ floating within their single chambered heart. At the center of this small organ is a smaller ball of gold—the purest gold imaginable. So pure it could be eaten. And if it were, I am told the result is one million beautiful dreams of flying.

“I had an uncle,” said the wizard, “who hunted the creature, bagged one, cut out its ball of gold, and proceeded to eat the entire thing in one bound. After that, my uncle was sane only five times a day. Always, he had his hands up. His tongue was always wagging, his eyes shivering. He walked away from home one night when no one was watching. He wandered into the forest. There were reports for a while of a ragged holy man but then a visitor returned his ring and watch and told us his head had been found. Once it was safely under glass, I performed my first magic on it and had it tell me about its final appointment with a Manticore.

“Take a lock of this hair, boy, when we’re done,” he said. “When you get old, tie it into a knot and wear it in your vest pocket. It will ward off danger… to an extent.”

“How fast do they run?” I asked.

“How fast?” he said, and then he stopped walking. A breeze blew through the windows and porticos of the work room. He turned quickly and looked over his shoulder out the window. Storm clouds, lush hedge, and a humidity of roses and cinnamon. The flies now swarmed. “That fast,” he said. “Draw it.”

“Notice,” he said, “there is no wound. The hunters didn’t kill it. It died of old age and they found it.” He stood very silent, his hands behind his back. I wondered if he’d run out of things to say. Then he cleared his throat and said, “There’s a point at which a wince and a smile share the same shape and intensity, almost but not quite the same meaning. It’s at that point and that point alone that you can begin to understand the beast’s scorpion tail. Sleek, black, poisonous, and needle sharp, it moves like lightening, piercing flesh and bone, depositing a chemical that halts all memory. When stung you want to scream, to run, to aim your crossbow at its magenta heart, but alas… you forget.”

“I’m drawing it,” I said. “Excellent,” he said and ran his free hand over one of the smooth sections of the scorpion tail. “Don’t forget to capture the forgetting.” He laughed to himself. “The Manticore venom was at one time used to cure certain cases of melancholia. There’s very often some incident from the past at the heart of depression. The green poison, measured judiciously, and administered with a long syringe to the corner of the eye, will instantly paralyze memory, negating the cause of sorrow. There was one fellow, I’d heard, who took too much of it and forgot to forget—he remembered everything and could let nothing go. His head filled up with every second of every day and it finally exploded.

“The poison doesn’t kill you, though. It only dazes you with the inability to remember, so those teeth can have their way. There are those few who’d been stung by the beast but not devoured. In every case, they described experiencing the same illusion—an eye-blink journey to an old summer home, with four floors of guest rooms, sunset, mosquitoes. For the duration of the poison’s strength, around two days, the victim lives at this retreat… in the mind, of course. There are cool breezes as the dark comes on, moths against the screen, the sound of waves far off, and the victim comes to the conclusion that he or she is alone. I suppose to die while in the throes of the poison, is to stay alone at that beautiful place by the sea for eternity.”

I spoke without thinking, “Every aspect of the beast brings you to eternity—the smile, the purest gold, the sting.”

“Write that down,” said Watkin. “What else can you say of it?”

“I remember that day I came to serve you,” I said, “and on the long stretch through the poplars, my carriage was stopped due to a dead body in the road. As the carriage passed, I peered out to see a bloody mess on the ground. You were one of the people in the crowd.”

“You can’t understand my invisible connection to these creatures—a certain symbiosis. I feel it in my lower back. Magic becomes a pin hole shrinking into the future,” he said.

“Can you bring the monster back to life?” I asked him.

“No,” he said. “It doesn’t work that way. I have something else in mind.” He stepped over to a work bench, left the cane there and lifted a hatchet. Returning to the body of the creature, he walked slowly around it to the tail. “That was my wife you saw in the road that day. Killed by a Manticore—by this very Manticore.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’d think you’d have tried harder to kill it.”

“Don’t try to understand,” he said. He lifted the hatchet high above his head, and then with one swift chop, severed the stinger from the tail of the creature. “Under the spell of the poison, I will go to the summer house and rescue her from eternity.”

“I’ll go with you,” I said.

“You can’t go. You could be stranded in eternity with my wife and me—think of that,” said Watkin. “No, there’s something else I need you to do for me while I’m under the effects of the venom. You must take the head of the Manticore into the forest and bury it. Their heads turn into the roots of trees, the fruit of which are Manticore pups. You’ll carry the last seed.” He used the hatchet to sever the creature’s head while I dressed for the outdoors.

I’d learned to ride a horse before I went to serve the wizard, but the forest at night frightened me. I couldn’t shake the image of Watkin’s palm impaled on the tip of the black stinger and him rapidly accruing dullness, gagging, his eyes rolling back behind their lids. I carried the Manticore head in a woolen sac tied to the saddle and trembled at the prospect that perhaps Watkin was wrong and the one sprawled on the work table, headless and tailless, was not the last. For my protection, he’d given me a spell to use if it became necessary—a fistful of yellow powder and a half dozen words I no longer remembered.

I rode through the dark for a few minutes and had quickly had enough of it. I dismounted and dug a hole at the side of the path, standing my torch upright in it. It made a broad circle of light on the ground. I retrieved the shovel I’d brought and the head. After nearly a half hour of digging, I began to hear a slight murmuring sound coming from somewhere close by me. I thought someone was spying from a darker part of the forest, and then I took it for the whirring of a Manticore’s tri-toothed jaws and was paralyzed by fear. Two minutes later, I realized the voice was coming from inside the sack. When I looked, the smile was facing out. The Manticore’s eyes went wide, that chasm of a mouth opened, flashing three-way ivory, and she spoke in a foreign language.

I took her out of the sack, set her head up at the center of the circle of torch light, brushed back her hair, and listened to the beautiful sing-song language. Later, after waking from a kind of trance brought on by the flow of words, I remembered the spell Watkin had given me. Laying the powder out on the upturned palm of my hand, I aimed it carefully and blew it into the creature’s face. She coughed. I’d forgotten the words, so said anything that I recalled them sounding like. Then she spoke to me, and I understood her.

“Eternity,” she said and then repeated it, methodically, with the precise same intonation again and again and again…

I grabbed the shovel and started digging. By the time I had dug a deep enough hole, my nerves were frayed by her repetition, and I couldn’t fill the dirt in fast enough. When the head was thoroughly buried, its endless phrase still sounding, muffled, beneath the ground, I tamped the soil down and then found an odd looking green rock, like a fist, to mark the spot for future reference.

Watkin never returned from the place by the sea. After the venom wore off, his body was lifeless. I then became the wizard. No one seemed to care that I knew nothing about magic. “Make it up till you’ve got it,” said the King. “Then spread it around.” I thanked him for his insight, but was aware he’d eaten pure gold and now, when not soaring in his dreams, was rarely sane. The years came and went, and I did my best to learn the devices, potions, phenomena, that Watkin had bothered to record. I suppose there was something of magic in it, but it wasn’t readily recognizable.

I was able to witness Watkin’s fate by use of a magic looking glass I’d found in his bedroom and learned to command. It was a tall mirror that stood on the back of his writing desk. In it I could see anywhere in existence with a simple command. I chose the quiet place by the sea, and there before me were the clean swept pathways, the blossoming wisteria, the gray and splintering fence board. Darkness was coming on. The woman with golden hair sat on the screened porch in a wicker rocker, listening to the floor boards creak. The twilight breeze was cool against sunburn. The day seemed endless. As night came on, she rocked herself to sleep. I ordered the mirror to show me her dream.

She dreamed that she was at the beach. The surf rolled gently up across the sand. There was a Manticore—her crimson resplendent against the clear blue day—fishing at the shoreline with a weighted net. Without fear, the woman with bright hair approached the creature. The Manticore politely asked, with smile upon smile, if the woman would like to help hoist the net. She nodded. The net was flung far out and they waited. Finally there was a tug. The woman with the golden hair and the Manticore both pulled hard to retrieve their catch. Eventually they dragged Watkin ashore, tangled in the webbing, seaweed in his hair. She ran to him and helped him out of the net. They put their arms around each other and kissed.

Now I keep my ears pricked up for descriptions of strange beasts in the heart of the forest. If a horse or a human goes missing, I must get to the bottom of it before I can rest. I try to speak to the hunters every day. Reports of the creature are vague but growing, and I realize now I have some invisible connection to it, as if its muffled, muted voice is enclosed within a chamber of my heart, relentlessly whispering, “Eternity.”

Cats went in and out of the witch’s house all day long. The windows stayed open, and the doors, and there were other doors, cat-sized and private, in the walls and up in the attic. The cats were large and sleek and silent. No one knew their names, or even if they had names, except for the witch.

Some of the cats were cream-colored and some were brindled. Some were black as beetles. They were about the witch’s business. Some came into the witch’s bedroom with live things in their mouths. When they came out again, their mouths were empty.

The cats trotted and slunk and leapt and crouched. They were busy. Their movements were catlike, or perhaps clockwork. Their tails twitched like hairy pendulums. They paid no attention to the witch’s children.

Zurich, 1935.

Mieze flattens her ears to her skull and thrashes her tail about in the manner of irritated cats everywhere. She opens her jaws so that she can smell with the inside of her mouth, a motion humans take for nervous panting.

Humans, who think they know so much. Who know so little.

Mieze needs the extra olfactory sense to track her surroundings in the airtight, light-tight box, where even her enormous, luminous golden eyes cannot see.

But there are many ways of seeing. Many ways of observing.

Eye-blind inside the box, Mieze still knows her surroundings well. She’s been here before. She’s endured many sessions in this container.

As soon as her human pet, Felicie, leaves for school, Felicie’s father, the great Herr Professor Erwin Schrödinger, is prone to pop Mieze in the box.

With the sensitive organs in her oral tissues, Mieze breathes in the smell of the sweet-honey heavy-lead walls of her prison; the acid metal taste and tick of the Geiger counter; the slick glassine odor of the bottle containing and masking, for now, the cyanide gas; the wood and steel of the trip-hammer poised to crash down on the cyanide bottle.

But even more than these, Mieze tastes/smells/observes/knows the pulse of electrons and trembling of nuclei in the little case that contains the radioactive isotope. This smaller box is surrounded by a cage to prevent her from dislodging it in the fit of fear or fury that Herr Erwin seems to expect of her. Does Herr Erwin think she hasn’t noticed that he hasn’t similarly secured the bottle of cyanide?

Well, that’s the crux of the matter, isn’t it? Not the great scientific experiment, the one Herr Erwin’s friend, the renowned Doktor Einstein, called the “prettiest way” to show that the wave representation of matter is an incomplete representation of reality.

No, the true reality, the real representation of reality, is that Herr Erwin, father Mieze’s beloved Felicie, detests cats.

So if Mieze, in the process of this to-be-famous experiment, should inadvertently bump into the cyanide instead of waiting for the statistical judgment of nuclei, what will Herr Erwin say? He will say, “I am a Swiss scientist. I am not responsible for the non-precision of felines.”

Yet for all the innocence Mieze knows Herr Erwin would profess, she notices how gingerly he lifts the lid at the end of each experiment, the gloves he has donned, the air-filter mask he wears over nose and mouth.

Haviland Tuf thought the Six Worlds Bio-Agricultural Exhibition a great disappointment.

He had spent a long wearying day on Brazelourn, trooping through the cavernous exhibition halls, pausing now and then to give a cursory inspection to a new grain hybrid or a genetically improved insect. Although the Ark’s cell library held cloning material for literally millions of plant and animal species from an uncounted number of worlds, Haviland Tuf was nonetheless always alert for any opportunity to expand his stock-in-trade.

But few of the displays on Brazelourn seemed especially promising, and as the hours passed Tuf grew bored and uncomfortable in the jostling, indifferent crowds. People swarmed everywhere—Vagabonder tunnel-farmers in deep maroon furs, plumed and perfumed Areeni landlords, somber nightsiders and brightly garbed evernoons from New Janus, and a plethora of the native Brazeleen. All of them made excessive noise and favored Tuf with curious stares as he passed among them. Some even brushed up against him, bringing a frown to his long face.

Ultimately, seeking escape from the throngs, Tuf decided he was hungry. He pressed his way through the fairgoers with dignified distaste, and emerged from the vaulting five-story Ptolan Exhibit Hall. Outside, hundreds of vendors had set up booths between the great buildings. The man selling pop-onion pies seemed least busy of those nearby, and Tuf determined that a pop-onion pie was the very thing he craved.

“Sir,” he said to the vendor, “I would have a pie.”

The pieman was round and pink and wore a greasy apron. He opened his hotbox, reached in with a gloved hand, and extracted a hot pie. When he pushed it across the counter at Tuf, he stared. “Oh,” he said, “you’re a big one.”

Indeed, sir,” said Haviland Tuf. He picked up the pie and bit into it impassively.

“You’re an offworlder,” the pieman observed. “Not from no place nearby, neither.”

Tuf finished his pie in three neat bites, and cleaned his greasy fingers on a napkin. “You belabor the obvious, sir,” he said. He held up a long, calloused finger. “Another,” he said.

Rebuffed, the vendor fetched out another pie without further observations, letting Tuf eat in relative peace. As he savored the flaky crust and tartness within, Tuf studied the milling fairgoers, the rows of vendors’ booths, and the five great halls that loomed over the landscape. When he had done eating, he turned back to the pieman, his face as blank as ever. “Sir, if you will, a question.”

“What’s that?” the other said gruffly.

“I see five exhibition halls,” said Haviland Tuf. “I have visited each in turn.” He pointed. “Brazelourn, Vale Areen, New Janus, Vagabond, and here Ptola.” Tuf folded his hands together neatly atop his bulging stomach. “Five, sir. Five halls, five worlds. No doubt, being a stranger as I am, I am unfamiliar with some subtle point of local usage, yet I am perplexed. In those regions where I have heretofore traveled, a gathering calling itself the Six Worlds Bio-Agricultural Exhibition might be expected to include exhibits from six worlds. Plainly that is not the case here. Perhaps you might enlighten me as to why?”

“No one came from Namor.”

“Indeed,” said Haviland Tuf.

“On account of the troubles,” the vendor added.

“All is made clear,” said Tuf. “Or, if not all, at least a portion. Perhaps you would care to serve me another pie, and explain to me the nature of these troubles. I am nothing if not curious, sir. It is my great vice, I fear.”

The pieman slipped on his glove again and opened the hotbox. “You know what they say. Curiosity makes you hungry.”

“Indeed,” said Tuf. “I must admit I have never heard them say that before.”

The man frowned. “No, I got it wrong. Hunger makes you curious, that’s what it is. Don’t matter. My pies will fill you up.”

“Ah,” said Tuf. He took up the pie. “Please proceed.”

So the pie-seller told him, at great rambling length, about the troubles on the world Namor. “So you can see,” he finally concluded, “why they didn’t come, with all this going on. Not much to exhibit.”

“Of course,” said Haviland Tuf, dabbing his lips. “Sea monsters can be most vexing.”

Your father-in-law, who insists that you call him Howie, even though you prefer Mr. Bragg, likes jigsaw puzzles. If they prove harder than he has the skill or the patience for, he knows a sneaky way around the problem.

During the third Christmas season after your marriage to Marti, you find Howie at a card table wearing a parka, a blue watch cap with a crown of burgundy leather, and fur-lined shoes. (December through February, it is freezing in the Braggs’ Tudor-style house outside Spartanburg.) He is assembling a huge jigsaw puzzle, for the Braggs give him one every Christmas. His challenge is to put it together, unaided by drop-in company or any other family member, before the Sugar Bowl kick-off on New Year’s Day.

This year, the puzzle is of cats.

The ESB procedure being administered to you by the Zoo Cop and his associates is keyed to cats. When they zap your implanted electrodes, cat-related memories parachute into your mind’s eye, opening out like fireworks.

Once upon a time to a family of house mice there was born a son named Gordon. He looked very much like his father and mother and all his brothers and sisters, who were gray and had bright, twitchy, black eyes, but what went on inside Gordon was very different from what went on inside the rest of his family. He was forever asking why everything had to be the way it was, and never satisfied with the answer. Why did mice eat cheese? Why did they live in the dark and only go out when it was dark? Where did mice come from, anyway? What were people? Why did people smell so funny? Suppose mice were big and people were tiny? Suppose mice could fly? Most mice don’t ask many questions, but Gordon never stopped.

One evening, when Gordon was only a few weeks old, his next-to-eldest sister was sent out to see if anything interesting had been left open in the pantry. She never returned. Gordon’s father shrugged sadly and spread his front paws, and said, “The cat.”

“What’s a cat?” Gordon asked.

His mother and father looked at one another and sighed. “They have to know sometime,” his father said. “Better he learns it at home than on the streets.”

His mother sniffled a little and said, “But he’s so young,” and his father answered, “Cats don’t care.” So they told Gordon about cats right then, expecting him to start crying and saying that there weren’t any such things. It’s a hard idea to get used to. But Gordon only asked, “Why do cats eat mice?”

“I guess we taste very good,” his father said.

Gordon said, “But cats don’t have to eat mice. They get plenty of other food that probably tastes as good. Why should anybody eat anybody if he doesn’t have to?”

“Gordon,” said his father. “Listen to me. There are two kinds of creatures in the world. There are animals that hunt, and animals that are hunted. We mice just happen to be the kind of animal that gets hunted, and it doesn’t really matter if the cat is hungry or not. It’s the way life is. It’s really a great honor to be the hunted, if you just look at it the right way.”

“Phooey on that,” said Gordon. “Where do I go to learn to be a cat?”

They thought he was joking, but as soon as Gordon was old enough to go places by himself, he packed a clean shirt and some peanut butter, and started off for cat school. “I love you very much,” he said to his parents before he left, “but this business of being hunted for the rest of my life just because I happened to be born a mouse is not for me.” And off he went, all by himself.

All cats go to school, you know, whether you ever see them going or not. Dogs don’t, but cats always have and always will. There are a great many cat schools, so Gordon found one easily enough, and he walked bravely up the front steps and knocked at the door. He said that he wanted to speak to the Principal.

He almost expected to be eaten right there, but the cats—students and teachers alike—were so astonished that they let him pass through, and one of the teachers took him to the Principal’s office. Gordon could feel the cats looking at him, and hear the sounds their noses made as they smelled how good he was, but he held on tight to the suitcase with his shirt and the peanut butter, and he never looked back.

The Principal was a fat old tiger cat who chewed on his tail all the time he was talking to Gordon. “You must be out of your mind,” he said when Gordon told him he wanted to be a cat. “I’d smack you up this minute, but it’s bad luck to eat crazies. Get out of here! The day mice go to cat school…”

“Why not?” said Gordon. “Is it in writing? Where does it say that I can’t go to school here if I want?”

Well, of course there’s nothing in the rules of cat schools that says mice can’t enroll. Nobody ever thought of putting it in.

The Principal folded his paws and said, “Gordon, look at it this way—”

“You look at it my way,” said Gordon. “I want to be a cat, and I bet I’d make a better one than the dopey-looking animals I’ve seen in this school. Most of them look as if they wouldn’t even make good mice! So let’s make a deal. You let me come to school here and study for one term, and if at the end of that time I’m not doing better than any cat in the school—if even one cat has better grades than I have—then you can eat me and that’ll be the end of it. Is that fair?”

No cat can resist a challenge like that. But before agreeing, the Principal insisted on one small change: at the end of the term, if Gordon didn’t have the very best marks in the school, then the privilege of eating him would go to the cat that did.

“Ought to encourage some of those louts to work harder,” the Principal said to himself, as Gordon left his office. “He’s crazy, but he’s right—most of them wouldn’t even make good mice. I almost hope he does it.”

So Gordon went to cat school. Every day he sat at his special little desk, surrounded by a hundred kittens and half-grown cats who would have liked nothing better than to leap on him and play games with him for a while before they gobbled him. He learned how to wash himself, and what to do to keep his claws sharp, and how to watch everything in the room while pretending to be asleep. There was a class on Dealing With Dogs, and another on Getting Down From Trees, which is much harder than climbing up, and also a particularly scholarly seminar on the various meanings of “Bad Kitty!” Gordon’s personal favorite was the Visions class, which had to do with the enchanting things all cats can see that no one else ever does—the great, gliding ancestors, and faraway castles, and mysterious forests full of monsters to chase. The Professor of Visions told his colleagues that he had never had such a brilliant student. “It would be a crime to eat such a mouse!” he proclaimed everywhere. “An absolute, shameful, yummy crime.”

The class in Mouse-Hunting was a bit awkward at first, because usually the teacher asks one of the students to be the mouse, and in Gordon’s case the Principal felt that would be too risky. But Gordon insisted on being chased like everyone else, and not only was he never caught (well, almost never; there was one blue Persian who could turn on a dime), but when he took his own turn at chasing, he proved to be a natural expert. In fact his instant mastery of the Flying Pounce caused his teacher and the entire class to sit up and applaud. Gordon took three bows and an encore.

There was also a class where the cats learned the necessities of getting along with people: how to lie in laps, how to keep from scratching furniture even when you feel you have to, what to do when children pick you up, and how to ask for food or affection in such a sweet manner that people call other people to look at you. These classes always made Gordon a little sad. He didn’t suppose that he would ever be a real “people” cat, for who would want to hold a mouse on his lap, or scratch it behind the ears while it purred? Still, he paid strict attention in People Class, as he did in all the others, for all the cats knew that whoever did best in school that term would be the one who ate him, and they worked harder than they ever had in their lives. The Principal said that they were becoming the best students in the school’s history, and he talked openly about making this a regular thing, one mouse to a term.

When all the marks were in, and all the grades added up, two students led the rankings: Gordon and the blue Persian. Their scores weren’t even a whisker’s thickness apart. In the really important classes, like Running And Pouncing, Climbing, Stalking, and Waiting For The Prey To Forget You’re Still There; and in matters of feline manners such as Washing, Tail Etiquette, The Elegant Yawn, Sleeping In Undignified Positions, and Making Sure You Get Enough Food Without Looking Greedy (101 and 102)—in all of these Gordon and the blue Persian were first, and the rest nowhere. Besides that, both could meow in five different dialects: Persian, Abyssinian, Siamese, Burmese (which almost no cat who isn’t Burmese ever learns), and basic tiger.

But there can only be one Top Cat to a term; no ties allowed. In order to decide the matter once and for all between them, the Principal announced that Gordon and the blue Persian would have to face one another in a competitive mouse roundup.

The Persian and Gordon got along quite well, all things considered, so they shook paws—carefully—and the Persian purred, “No hard feelings.”

“None at all,” Gordon answered. “If anyone here got to eat me, I’d much rather it was you.”

“Very sporting of you,” the Persian said. “I hope so too.”

“But it won’t happen,” Gordon said.

The blue Persian never had a chance. Once he and Gordon were set on their marks in a populous mouse neighborhood, Gordon ambushed and outsmarted and cornered all but a handful of the very quickest mice, and did it in a style so smooth, so effortlessly elegant—so catlike—that the Persian finally threw up his paws and surrendered. In front of the entire faculty and student body of the cat school, he announced, “I yield to Gordon. He’s a better cat than I am, and I’m not ashamed to admit it. If all mice were like him, we cats would be vegetarians.” (Persians are very dramatic.)

The cheering was so wild and thunderous that no one objected in the least when Gordon freed all the mice he had captured. Cats can appreciate a grand gesture, and everyone had already had lunch.

Gordon had won his bet, and, like the blue Persian, the Principal was cat enough to accept it graciously. He scheduled a celebration, which the whole school attended, and at the end of the party he announced that Gordon was now to be considered as much a cat as any student in the school, if not more so. He gave Gordon a little card to show that he was a cat in good standing, and all the students cheered, and Gordon made another speech that began, “Fellow cats….” As he spoke, he wished very much that his parents could be there to see what he had accomplished, and just how different things could be if you just asked questions and weren’t afraid of new ideas.

Being acknowledged the best cat in the school didn’t make Gordon let up in his studies. Instead, he worked even harder, and did so well that he graduated with the special degree of felis maximus, which is Latin for some cat! He stayed on at the school to teach a seminar in Evasive Maneuvers, which proved very popular, and a course in the Standing Jump (for a bird that comes flying over when you weren’t looking).

The story of his new life spread everywhere among all mice, and grew very quickly into a myth more terrifying than any cat could have been. They whispered of “Gordon the Terrible,” “Gordon, the Self-Made Cat,” and, simply, “The Unspeakable,” and told midnight tales of a gigantic mouse who lashed his tail and sprang at them with his razor claws out and his savage yellow eyes blazing; a mouse without pity who hunted them out in their deepest hiding places, walking without a sound. They believed unquestioningly that he ate mice like gingersnaps, and laughingly handed over to his cat friends those he was too full to devour. There was even a dreadful legend that Gordon had eaten his own family, and that he frequently took kittens from the school on field trips in order to teach them personally the secret mouse ways that no mere cat could ever have known.

These stories made Gordon deeply unhappy when he heard them, because he believed with absolute conviction that what he had achieved was for the good of all mice everywhere. Whether he trapped a lone mouse or cornered a dozen trembling in an attic or behind a refrigerator, he would say the same thing to them: “Look at me. Look at me! I am a mouse like you—nothing more, nothing less—and yet I walk with cats every day, and I am not eaten! I am respected, I am admired, I am even powerful among cats—and every one of you could be like me! Do not believe that we mice are born only to be hunted, humiliated, tormented, and finally gobbled up. It is not true! Instead of huddling in the shadows, in constant lifelong terror, pitiful little balls of fur, we too can be sleek, fierce hunters, fearing nothing and no one. Run now and spread the word! You must spread the word!”

Saying that, he would step back and let the mice scatter, hoping each time that they would finally understand what he was trying to show them. But it simply never happened. The mice always scurried away, convinced that they had escaped only by great good fortune, and myths and legends of the terrible Self-Made Cat were all that spread among them, growing ever more horrifying, ever more chilling. It didn’t matter that not one mouse had ever actually seen Gordon doing any of the frightful things he was supposed to have done. That’s the way it is with legends.

Now it happened that Gordon was walking down the street one day, on his way to a faculty meeting, padding along like a leopard, twitching his tail like a lion, and making the eager little noises in his throat that a tiger makes when he smells food. Quite suddenly an enormous shadow fell across his path, so big that he looked up to see if he were going through a tunnel. What he saw was a dog. What he actually saw was a leg, for this dog was huge, too big for even a full-grown cat to have understood his real size without looking twice. The dog rumbled, “Oh, goody! I love mice. Lots of phosphorus in mice. Yummy.”

Gordon crouched, tail lashing, and lifted the fur along his spine. “Watch it, dog,” he said warningly. “Don’t mess with me, I’m telling you.”

“Oh, how cute,” the dog said. “He’s playing he’s a cat. I’m a cat too. Meow.”

“I am a cat!” Gordon arched his back until it ached, hissing and spitting and growling in his throat, all more or less at the same time. “I am! You want to see my card? Look, right here.”

“A crazy,” the dog said wonderingly. “They say it’s bad luck to eat a crazy. Good thing I’m not superstitious.”

Having given the proper First Warning, exactly as he’d been taught, Gordon moved quickly to the Second—the lightning-swift slash of the right paw across the nose. Gordon had to leap straight up to reach the dog’s big wet nose, but even with that handicap, he executed the Second Warning in superb style.

Instead of yelping and retreating in a properly humbled state, however, the dog only sneezed.

This, Gordon thought, is the difference between theory and practice.

But there was a reason that Gordon’s seminar in Evasive Maneuvers was always so well attended. With astonishing daring, he went directly from the Second Warning right into the Fourth Avoidance, which involves a double feint—head looking this way, tail jerking that way—followed by a quick, threatening charge directly at the attacker, and then a leap to the side, which, done correctly, leaves one perfectly poised either for escape or the Flying Pounce, depending on the situation.

But the big dog had no idea that a classic Evasive Maneuver had just been performed upon him, leaving him looking like an idiot. He was used to looking like an idiot. He gave a delighted bounce, wuffed, “Tag—you’re it!” and went straight for Gordon, who responded by going up a tree with the polished grace that always left his students too breathless to cheer. He found a comfortable branch and rested there, thinking ruefully that a real cat wouldn’t have been so proud of being a cat as to waste time arguing about it.

The dog sat down too, grinning. “Be a bird now,” he called to Gordon. “Let’s see you be a bird and fly away.”

Normally, Gordon could easily have stayed up in the tree longer than the dog felt like waiting below, but he was tired and rather thirsty, not to mention annoyed at the thought of being late for the faculty meeting. Something had to be done. But what?

He was bravely considering an original plan of leaping straight down at the dog, when three young mice happened along. They had been out shopping for their mother.

They were really very young, and as they had never seen Gordon the Terrible—though they had heard about him since they were blind babies—they didn’t know who it was in the tree. All they saw was a fellow mouse in danger, and, being at the age when they didn’t know any better than to do things like that, they carefully put down their packages and began luring the dog away from the tree. First one mouse would rush in at him and make the dog chase him a little way, and then another would come scampering from somewhere else, so that the dog would leave off chasing the first mouse and go after him.

The dog, who was actually quite good-natured, and not very hungry, had a fine time running after them all. He followed them farther and farther away from the tree, and had probably forgotten all about Gordon by the time the Unspeakable was able to spring down from the tree and vanish into the bushes.

Gordon would have waited to thank the three mice, but they had disappeared, along with the dog. Anxious not to miss his meeting, he dashed back to the school, slowing down before he got there to catch his breath and smooth his whiskers. “It could happen to anyone,” he told himself. “There’s nothing to be ashamed of.” Yet there was something fundamentally troubling to Gordon about having run away. Feeling uncertain for the first time since he had marched up the front steps, he washed himself all over and stalked on into the school, outwardly calm and proud, the best cat anyone there would ever see, Gordon the Terrible, the Unspeakable—yes, the Self-Made Cat.

But another cat—the Assistant Professor of Tailchasing, in fact—had seen the whole incident, and had already interrupted the faculty meeting with the shocking tale.

The Principal tried to brush the news aside. “When it’s time to climb a tree, you climb a tree,” he said. “Any cat knows that.” (He had become quite fond of Gordon, in his way.)

It wasn’t enough. The Assistant Professor of Tailchasing (a chocolate-point Siamese who dreamed of one day heading the school himself) led the opposition. As the Assistant Professor saw it, Gordon was plainly a fraud, a pretender, a cat in card only, so friendly with his fellow mice that they had rushed to help him when he was in danger. In light of that, who could say what Gordon’s real plans might be? Why had he come to the school in the first place? What if more like him followed? What if the mice were plotting to attack the cat school, all cat schools?

This thought rattled everyone at the table. With a mouse like Gordon in their midst, a mouse who knew far more about being a cat than the cats themselves, was any feline safe?

Just that quickly, fear replaced reason. Within minutes everyone but the Principal forgot how much they had liked and admired Gordon. Admitting him to the school had been a catastrophic mistake, one that must be set right without a moment’s delay!

The Principal groaned and covered his eyes and sent for Gordon. He was almost crying as he took Gordon’s cat card away.

Gordon protested like mad, of course. He spoke of Will and Choice, and Freedom, and the transforming power of Questioning Assumptions. But the Principal said sadly, “We just can’t trust you, Gordon. Go away now, before I eat you myself. I always wondered what you’d taste like.” Then he put his head down on his desk and really did begin to cry.

So Gordon packed his clean shirt and his leftover peanut butter and left the cat school. All the cats formed a double line to let him pass, their faces turned away, and nobody said a word. The Assistant Professor of Tailchasing was poised to pounce at the very last, but the Principal stepped on his tail.

Nobody ever heard of Gordon again. There were stories that he’d gone right on being a cat, even without his card; and there were other tales that said he had been driven out of the country by the mice themselves. But only the Principal knew for sure, because only the Principal had heard the words that Gordon was muttering to himself as he walked away from the cat school with his head held high.

“Woof,” Gordon was murmuring thoughtfully. “Woof. Bow-wow. Shouldn’t be too hard.”

It was his wife’s debt to Onofrio Esteves, the appliance dealer, that brought Esteban Caax to town for the first time in almost a year. By nature he was a man who enjoyed the sweetness of the countryside above all else; the placid measures of a farmer’s day invigorated him, and he took great pleasure in nights spent joking and telling stories around a fire, or lying beside his wife, Incarnación. Puerto Morada, with its fruit-company imperatives and sullen dogs and cantinas that blared American music, was a place he avoided like the plague; indeed, from his home atop the mountain whose slopes formed the northernmost enclosure of Bahía Onda, the rusted tin roofs ringing the bay resembled a dried crust of blood such as might appear upon the lips of a dying man.

On this particular morning, however, he had no choice but to visit the town. Incarnación had—without his knowledge—purchased a battery-operated television set on credit from Onofrio, and he was threatening to seize Esteban’s three milk cows in lieu of the eight hundred lempiras that was owed; he refused to accept the return of the television, but had sent word that he was willing to discuss an alternate method of payment. Should Esteban lose the cows, his income would drop below a subsistence level and he would be forced to take up his old occupation, an occupation far more onerous than farming.

As he walked down the mountain, past huts of thatch and brushwood poles identical to his own, following a trail that wound through sun-browned thickets lorded over by banana trees, he was not thinking of Onofrio but of Incarnación. It was in her nature to be frivolous, and he had known this when he had married her; yet the television was emblematic of the differences that had developed between them since their children had reached maturity. She had begun to put on sophisticated airs, to laugh at Esteban’s country ways, and she had become the doyenne of a group of older women, mostly widows, all of whom aspired to sophistication. Each night they would huddle around the television and strive to outdo one another in making sagacious comments about the American detective shows they watched; and each night Esteban would sit outside the hut and gloomily ponder the state of his marriage. He believed Incarnación’s association with the widows was her manner of telling him that she looked forward to adopting the black skirt and shawl, that—having served his purpose as a father—he was now an impediment to her. Though she was only forty-one, younger by three years than Esteban, she was withdrawing from the life of the senses; they rarely made love anymore, and he was certain that this partially embodied her resentment to the fact that the years had been kind to him. He had the look of one of the Old Patuca—tall, with chiseled features and wide-set eyes; his coppery skin was relatively unlined and his hair jet black. Incarnación’s hair was streaked with gray, and the clean beauty of her limbs had dissolved beneath layers of fat. He had not expected her to remain beautiful, and he had tried to assure her that he loved the woman she was and not merely the girl she had been. But that woman was dying, infected by the same disease that had infected Puerto Morada, and perhaps his love for her was dying, too.

The dusty street on which the appliance store was situated ran in back of the movie theater and the Hotel Circo del Mar, and from the inland side of the street Esteban could see the bell towers of Santa María del Onda rising above the hotel roof like the horns of a great stone snail. As a young man, obeying his mother’s wish that he become a priest, he had spent three years cloistered beneath those towers, preparing for the seminary under the tutelage of old Father Gonsalvo. It was the part of his life he most regretted, because the academic disciplines he had mastered seemed to have stranded him between the world of the Indian and that of contemporary society; in his heart he held to his father’s teachings—the principles of magic, the history of the tribe, the lore of nature—and yet he could never escape the feeling that such wisdom was either superstitious or simply unimportant. The shadows of the towers lay upon his soul as surely as they did upon the cobbled square in front of the church, and the sight of them caused him to pick up his pace and lower his eyes.

Farther along the street was the Cantina Atómica, a gathering place for the well-to-do youth of the town, and across from it was the appliance store, a one-story building of yellow stucco with corrugated metal doors that were lowered at night. Its façade was decorated by a mural that supposedly represented the merchandise within: sparkling refrigerators and televisions and washing machines, all given the impression of enormity by the tiny men and women painted below them, their hands upflung in awe. The actual merchandise was much less imposing, consisting mainly of radios and used kitchen equipment. Few people in Puerto Morada could afford more, and those who could generally bought elsewhere. The majority of Onofrio’s clientele were poor, hard-pressed to meet his schedule of payments, and to a large degree his wealth derived from selling repossessed appliances over and over.

Raimundo Esteves, a pale young man with puffy cheeks and heavily lidded eyes and a petulant mouth, was leaning against the counter when Esteban entered; Raimundo smirked and let out a piercing whistle, and a few seconds later his father emerged from the back room: a huge slug of a man, even paler than Raimundo. Filaments of gray hair were slicked down across his mottled scalp, and his belly stretched the front of a starched guayabera. He beamed and extended a hand.

“How good to see you,” he said. “Raimundo! Bring us coffee and two chairs.”

Much as he disliked Onofrio, Esteban was in no position to be uncivil: He accepted the handshake. Raimundo spilled coffee in the saucers and clattered the chairs and glowered, angry at being forced to serve an Indian.

“Why will you not let me return the television?” asked Esteban after taking a seat; and then, unable to bite back the words, he added, “Is it no longer your policy to swindle my people?”

Onofrio sighed, as if it were exhausting to explain things to a fool such as Esteban. “I do not swindle your people. I go beyond the letter of the contracts in allowing them to make returns rather than pursuing matters through the courts. In your case, however, I have devised a way whereby you can keep the television without any further payments and yet settle the account. Is this a swindle?”

It was pointless to argue with a man whose logic was as facile and self-serving as Onofrio’s. “Tell me what you want,” said Esteban.

Onofrio wetted his lips, which were the color of raw sausage. “I want you to kill the jaguar of Barrio Carolina.”

“I no longer hunt,” said Esteban.

“The Indian is afraid,” said Raimundo, moving up behind Onofrio’s shoulder. “I told you.”

Onofrio waved him away and said to Esteban, “That is unreasonable. If I take the cows, you will once again be hunting jaguars. But if you do this, you will have to hunt only one jaguar.”

“One that has killed eight hunters.” Esteban set down his coffee cup and stood. “It is no ordinary jaguar.”

Raimundo laughed disparagingly, and Esteban skewered him with a stare.

“Ah!” said Onofrio, smiling a flatterer’s smile. “But none of the eight used your method.”

“Your pardon, don Onofrio,” said Esteban with mock formality. “I have other business to attend.”

“I will pay you five hundred lempiras in addition to erasing the debt,” said Onofrio.

“Why?” asked Esteban. “Forgive me, but I cannot believe it is due to a concern for the public welfare.”

Onofrio’s fat throat pulsed, his face darkened.

“Never mind,” said Esteban. “It is not enough.”

“Very well. A thousand.” Onofrio’s casual manner could not conceal the anxiety in his voice.

Intrigued, curious to learn the extent of Onofrio’s anxiety, Esteban plucked a figure from the air. “Ten thousand,” he said. “And in advance.”

“Ridiculous! I could hire ten hunters for this much! Twenty!”

Esteban shrugged. “But none with my method.”

For a moment Onofrio sat with hands enlaced, twisting them, as if struggling with some pious conception. “All right,” he said, the words squeezed out of him. “Ten thousand!”

The reason for Onofrio’s interest in Barrio Carolina suddenly dawned on Esteban, and he understood that the profits involved would make his fee seem pitifully small. But he was possessed by the thought of what ten thousand lempiras could mean: a herd of cows, a small truck to haul produce, or—and as he thought it, he realized this was the happiest possibility—the little stucco house in Barrio Clarín that Incarnación had set her heart on. Perhaps owning it would soften her toward him. He noticed Raimundo staring at him, his expression a knowing smirk; and even Onofrio, though still outraged by the fee, was beginning to show signs of satisfaction, adjusting the fit of his guayabera, slicking down his already-slicked-down hair. Esteban felt debased by their capacity to buy him, and to preserve a last shred of dignity, he turned and walked to the door.

“I will consider it,” he tossed back over his shoulder. “And I will give you my answer in the morning.”

That year I had some business to see to in Kent, and it wasn’t long after arranging this that I received the letter from my uncle. It came as a surprise; at first I hadn’t the faintest idea who was writing to me so familiarly. When I realized, I was in two minds. But curiosity got the upper hand.

I had better explain that I was nephew only to one uncle, Arthur, the brother of my then-deceased male parent. Arthur had made a lot of money in the north of England, as my mother had been wont to say: “By exploiting the workers and putting them into marmalade.” This had always been the joke, that Uncle Arthur had made a fortune in marmalade, some exotic variety which, I’m pretty certain, never appeared on our table. Frankly, once I’d grown up and moved into my own life, I may well, here and there, have eaten the fabulous spread—and not known it. Basically, Arthur had removed himself from the family early on, and never afterwards himself maintained any contact. My father had seen his brother last in childhood. “I was only five when he took himself off. But I always remember, he was a funny chap,” said my father. “Peculiar things stick in your mind, even when you can’t recall what they were all about.” The peculiar Arthurian thing which had stuck, apparently, concerned an Arthur then sixteen years of age, letting out a loud cry and promptly fainting to the ground.

“We were in some sort of park—I think it was a park. We were going somewhere, but there was such a fuss, we didn’t go. I’ve no memory as to where. All I recollect is Arthur yelling at the top of his lungs and sprawling on the gravel path.”

“Perhaps,” postulated my mother, “it was the first time making a fortune in marmalade occurred to him.”

In fact, though Arthur did become extremely rich, it formed a dark mark on his escutcheon that none of this wealth was ever put in the way either of my grandparents, or my father’s family, of which it seemed Arthur had been told.

Arthur’s contemporary letter, however, when it reached me, was friendly and warm in tone. He said that he had come across my name in a promotion in the local newspapers, relating to the theatrical performance because of which I was going down to Kent. Since our name is rather unusual, he had decided it must be me, and an inquiry at a London theatre provided him my address. The substance of his letter was to invite me to stay with him at his house. This was, he assured me, only three miles from my business venue, and his chauffeur would, of course, drive me in each day and retrieve me in the evening. Arthur was sure, besides, I would appreciate the comforts of a house over an “inn,” and added that he sincerely hoped I would visit him, we had been “estranged” too long.

Initially I tossed the letter in the waste-paper bin. But then, as I say, curiosity won me round. By that era of my life, I was involved in work I found both fascinating and highly remunerative, so Arthur’s fortune had no allure. But I’d heard of the house, which I will call Blue Firs, a place, it seemed, of luxury. And I confess I wondered very much what Arthur would be like—and if at all like my father, or even myself.

I therefore rescued his letter, and replied in the affirmative. The next morning, I travelled down to Kent.

“To understand Jonesy, I’ve watched countless bored, scary big cats in Busch Gardens, the Cleveland Zoo, and other zoological gardens, contemplating their casual menace. Jonesy’s roll-and-strike attack is based on speculations of the way sabertooth cats tore out the throats of their prey, but the truth is, I’ve observed my kitten, Mahasamatman, make the same move play-attacking another cat.”

Look, it wasn’t my idea.

And it happened very quickly. One day back in early June Carolyn brought pastrami sandwiches and celery tonic to the bookstore, and I showed her a couple of books, an Ellen Glasgow novel and the collected letters of Evelyn Waugh. She took a look at the spines and made a sound somewhere between a tssst and a cluck. “You know what did that,” she said.

“I have a haunting suspicion.”

“Mice, Bern.”

“That’s what I was afraid you were going to say.”

“Rodents,” she said. “Vermin. You can throw those books right in the garbage.”

“Maybe I should keep them. Maybe they’ll eat these and leave the others alone.”

“Maybe you should leave a quarter under your pillow,” she said, “and the Tooth Fairy’ll come in the middle of the night and chew their heads off.”

“That doesn’t seem very realistic, Carolyn.”

“No,” she said. “It doesn’t. Bern, you wait right here.”

“Where are you going?”

“I won’t be long,” she said. “Don’t eat my sandwich.”

“I won’t, but—”

“And don’t leave it where the mice can get it, either.”

“Mouse,” I said. “There’s no reason to assume there’s more than one.”

“Bern,” she said, “take my word for it. There’s no such thing as one mouse.”

I might have figured out what she was up to, but I opened the Waugh volume while I knocked off the rest of my own sandwich, and one letter led to another. I was still at it when the door opened and there she was, back again. She was holding one of those little cardboard satchels with air holes, the kind shaped like a New England salt box house.

The sort of thing you carry cats in.

“Oh, no,” I said.

“Bern, give me a minute, huh?”

“No.”

“Bern, you’ve got mice. Your shop is infested with rodents. Do you know what that means?”

“It doesn’t mean I’m going to be infested with cats.”

“Not cats,” she said. “There’s no such thing as one mouse. There is such a thing as one cat. That’s all I’ve got in here, Bern. One cat.”

“That’s good,” I said. “You came in here with one cat, and you can leave with one cat. It makes it easy to keep track that way.”

“You can’t just live with the mice. They’ll do thousands of dollars worth of damage. They won’t sit back and settle down with one volume and read it from cover to cover, you know. No, it’s a bite here and a bite there, and before you know it you’re out of business.”

“Don’t you think you’re overdoing it?”

“No way. Bern, remember the Great Library at Alexandria? One of the seven wonders of the ancient world, and then a single mouse got in there.”

“I thought you said there was no such thing as a single mouse.”

“Well, now there’s no such thing as the Great Library at Alexandria, and all because the pharaoh’s head librarian didn’t have the good sense to keep a cat.”

“There are other ways to get rid of mice,” I said.

“Name one.”

“Poison.”

“Bad idea, Bern.”

“What’s so bad about it?”

“Forget the cruelty aspect of it.”

“Okay,” I said. “It’s forgotten.”

“Forget the horror of gobbling down something with Warfarin in it and having all your little blood vessels burst. Forget the hideous spectre of one of God’s own little warmblooded creatures dying a slow, agonizing death from internal bleeding. Forget all that, Bern. If you possibly can.”

“All forgotten. The memory tape’s a blank.”

“Instead, focus on the idea of dozens of mice dying in the walls around you, where you can’t see them or get at them.”

“Ah, well. Out of sight, out of mind. Isn’t that what they say?”

“Nobody ever said it about dead mice. You’ll have a store with hundreds of them decomposing in the walls.”

“Hundreds?”

“God knows the actual number. The poisoned bait’s designed to draw them from all over the area. You could have mice scurrying here from miles around, mice from SoHo to Kips Bay, all of them coming here to die.”

I rolled my eyes.

“Maybe I’m exaggerating a tiny bit,” she allowed. “But all you need is one dead mouse in the wall and you’re gonna smell a rat, Bern.”

“A mouse, you mean.”

“You know what I mean. And maybe your customers won’t exactly cross the street to avoid walking past the store—”

“Some of them do that already.”

“—but they won’t be too happy spending time in a shop with a bad odor to it. They might drop in for a minute, but they won’t browse. No book lover wants to stand around smelling rotting mice.”

“Traps,” I suggested.

“Traps? You want to set mousetraps?”

“The world will beat a path to my door.”

“What kind will you get, Bern? The kind with a powerful spring, that sooner or later you screw up while you’re setting it and it takes off the tip of your finger? The kind that breaks the mouse’s neck, and you open up the store and there’s this dead mouse with its neck broken, and you’ve got to deal with that first thing in the morning?”

“Maybe one of those new glue traps. Like a Roach Motel, but for mice.”

“‘Mice check in, but they can’t check out.’”

“That’s the idea.”

“Great idea. There’s the poor little mousie with its feet caught, whining piteously for hours, maybe trying to gnaw off its own feet in a pathetic attempt to escape, like a fox in a leg-hold trap in one of those animal-rights commercials.”

“Carolyn—”

“It could happen. Who are you to say it couldn’t happen? Anyway, you come in and open the store and there’s the mouse, still alive, and then what do you do? Stomp on it? Get a gun and shoot it? Fill the sink and drown it?”

“Suppose I just drop it in the garbage, trap and all.”

“Now that’s humane,” she said. “Poor thing’s half-suffocated in the dark for days, and then the garbage men toss the bag into the hopper and it gets ground up into mouseburger. That’s terrific, Bern. While you’re at it, why not drop the trap into the incinerator? Why not burn the poor creature alive?”

I remembered something. “You can release the mice from glue traps,” I said. “You pour a little baby oil on their feet and it acts as a solvent for the glue. The mouse just runs off, none the worse for wear.”

“None the worse for wear?”

“Well—”

“Bern,” she said. “Don’t you realize what you’d be doing? You’d be releasing a psychotic mouse. Either it would find its way back into the store or it would get into one of the neighboring buildings, and who’s to say what it would do? Even if you let it go miles from here, even if you took it clear out to Flushing, you’d be unleashing a deranged rodent upon the unsuspecting public. Bern, forget traps. Forget poison. You don’t need any of that.” She tapped the side of the cat carrier. “You’ve got a friend,” she said.

“You’re not talking friends. You’re talking cats.”

“What have you got against cats?”

“I haven’t got anything against cats. I haven’t got anything against elk, either, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to keep one in the store so I’ll have a place to hang my hat.”

“I thought you liked cats.”

“They’re okay.”

“You’re always sweet to Archie and Ubi. I figured you were fond of them.”

“I am fond of them,” I said. “I think they’re fine in their place, and their place happens to be your apartment. Carolyn, believe me, I don’t want a pet. I’m not the type. If I can’t even keep a steady girlfriend, how can I keep a pet?”

“Pets are easier,” she said with feeling. “Believe me. Anyway, this cat’s not a pet.”

“Then what is it?”

“An employee,” she said. “A working cat. A companion animal by day, a solitary night watchman when you’re gone. A loyal, faithful, hard-working servant.”

“Miaow,” the cat said.

There was a gentleman of independent means who, at about the age of fifty-six, conceived of a passionate hatred for his much-younger wife’s white Persian cat.

His hatred for the cat was all the more ironic, and puzzling, in that he himself had given the cat to his wife as a kitten, years ago, when they were first married. And he himself had named her Miranda—after his favorite Shakespearean heroine.

It was ironic, too, in that he was hardly a man given to irrational sweeps of emotion. Except for his wife (whom he’d married late—his first marriage, her second) he did not love anyone very much, and would have thought it beneath his dignity to hate anyone. For whom should he take that seriously? Being a gentleman of independent means allowed him that independence of spirit unknown to the majority of men.

Julius Muir was of slender build, with deep-set, somber eyes of no distinctive color; thinning, graying, baby-fine hair; and a narrow, lined face to which the adjective lapidary had once been applied, with no vulgar invention of mere flattery. Being of old American stock he was susceptible to none of the fashionable tugs and sways of “identity”: He knew who he was, who his ancestors were, and thought the subject of no great interest. His studies both in America and abroad had been undertaken with a dilettante’s rather than a scholar’s pleasure, but he would not have wished to make too much of them. Life, after all, is a man’s primary study.

Fluent in several languages, Mr. Muir had a habit of phrasing his words with inordinate care, as if he were translating them into a common vernacular. He carried himself with an air of discreet self-consciousness that had nothing in it of vanity, or pride, yet did not bespeak a pointless humility. He was a collector (primarily of rare books and coins), but he was certainly not an obsessive collector; he looked upon the fanaticism of certain of his fellows with a bemused disdain. So his quickly blossoming hatred for his wife’s beautiful white cat surprised him, and for a time amused him. Or did it frighten him? Certainly he didn’t know what to make of it!

The animosity began as an innocent sort of domestic irritation, a half-conscious sense that being so respected in public—so recognized as the person of quality and importance he assuredly was—he should warrant that sort of treatment at home. Not that he was naively ignorant of the fact that cats have a way of making their preferences known that lacks the subtlety and tact devised by human beings. But as the cat grew older and more spoiled and ever more choosy it became evident that she did not, for affection, choose him. Alissa was her favorite, of course; then one or another of the help; but it was not uncommon for a stranger, visiting the Muirs for the first time, to win or to appear to win Miranda’s capricious heart. “Miranda! Come here!” Mr. Muir might call—gently enough, yet forcibly, treating the animal in fact with a silly sort of deference—but at such times Miranda was likely to regard him with indifferent, unblinking eyes and make no move in his direction. What a fool, she seemed to be saying, to court someone who cares so little for you!

If he tried to lift her in his arms—if he tried, with a show of playfulness, to subdue her—in true cat fashion she struggled to get down with as much violence as if a stranger had seized her. Once as she squirmed out of his grasp, she accidentally raked the back of his hand and drew blood that left a faint stain on the sleeve of his dinner jacket. “Julius, dear, are you hurt?” Alissa asked. “Not at all,” Mr. Muir said, dabbing at the scratches with a handkerchief. “I think Miranda is excited because of the company,” Alissa said. “You know how sensitive she is.” “Indeed I do,” Mr. Muir said mildly, winking at their guests. But a pulse beat hard in his head and he was thinking he would like to strangle the cat with his bare hands—were he the kind of man who was capable of such an act.

More annoying still was the routine nature of the cat’s aversion to him. When he and Alissa sat together in the evening, reading, each at an end of their sofa, Miranda would frequently leap unbidden into Alissa’s lap—but shrink fastidiously from Mr. Muir’s very touch. He professed to be hurt. He professed to be amused. “I’m afraid Miranda doesn’t like me any longer,” he said sadly. (Though in truth he could no longer remember if there’d been a time the creature had liked him. When she’d been a kitten, perhaps, and utterly indiscriminate in her affections?) Alissa laughed and said apologetically, “Of course she likes you, Julius,” as the car purred loudly and sensuously in her lap. “But—you know how cats are.”

“Indeed, I am learning,” Mr. Muir said with a stiff little smile.

And he felt he was learning—something to which he could give no name.

“I’m here.”

“You’re what?”

“I said I’m here.”

“Aw, don’t start with me. Don’t get started.”

Jill’s lying on the stained expensive sofa with the TV on in front of her tuned to some game show, a bottle of Jim Beam on the floor and a glass in her hand. She doesn’t see me but Zoey does. Zoey’s curled up on the opposite side of the couch waiting for her morning feeding and the sun’s been up four hours now, it’s ten o’clock and she’s used to her Friskies at eight.

I always had a feeling cats saw things that people didn’t. Now I know.

She’s looking at me with a kind of imploring interest. Eyes wide, black nose twitching. I know she expects something of me. I’m trying to give it to her.

“You’re supposed to feed her for godsakes. The litter box needs changing.”

“What? Who?”

“The cat. Zoey. Food. Water. The litter box. Remember?”

She fills the glass again. Jill’s been doing this all night and all morning, with occasional short naps. It was bad while I was alive but since the cab cut me down four days ago on 72nd and Broadway it’s gotten immeasurably worse. Maybe in her way she misses me. I only just returned last night from god knows where knowing there was something I had to do or try to do and maybe this is it. Snap her out of it.

“Jesus! Lemme the hell alone. You’re in my goddamn head. Get outa my goddamn head!”

She shouts this loud enough for the neighbors to hear. The neighbors are at work. She isn’t. So nobody pounds the walls. Zoey just looks at her, then back at me. I’m standing at the entrance to the kitchen. I know that’s where I am but I can’t see myself at all. I gesture with my hands but no hands appear in front of me. I look in the hall mirror and there’s nobody there. It seems that only my seven-year-old cat can see me.

When I arrived she was in the bedroom asleep on the bed. She jumped off and trotted over with her black-and-white tail raised, the white tip curled at the end. You can always tell a cat’s happy by the tail-language. She was purring. She tried to nuzzle me with the side of her jaw where the scent-glands are, trying to mark me as her own, to confirm me in the way cats do, the way she’s done thousands of times before but something wasn’t right. She looked up at me puzzled. I leaned down to scratch her ears but of course I couldn’t and that seemed to puzzle her more. She tried marking me with her haunches. No go.

“I’m sorry,” I said. And I was. My chest felt full of lead.

“Come on, Jill. Get up! You need to feed her. Shower. Make a pot of coffee. Whatever it takes.”

“This is fuckin’ crazy,” she says.

She gets up though. Looks at the clock on the mantle. Stalks off on wobbly legs toward the bathroom. And then I can hear the water running for the shower. I don’t want to go in there. I don’t want to watch her. I don’t want to see her naked anymore and haven’t for a long while. She was an actress once. Summer stock and the occasional commercial. Nothing major. But god, she was beautiful. Then we married and soon social drinking turned to solo drinking and then drinking all day long and her body slid fast into too much weight here, too little there. Pockets of self-abuse. I don’t know why I stayed. I’d lost my first wife to cancer. Maybe I just couldn’t bear to lose another.

Maybe I’m just loyal.

I don’t know.

I hear the water turn off and a while later she walks back into the living room in her white terry robe, her hair wrapped in a pink towel. She glances at the clock. Reaches down to the table for a cigarette. Lights it and pulls on it furiously. She’s still wobbly but less so. She’s scowling. Zoey’s watching her carefully. When she gets like this, half-drunk and half-straight, she’s dangerous. I know.

“You still here?

“Yes.”

She laughs. It’s not a nice laugh.

“Sure you are.”

“I am.”

“Bullshit. You fuckin’ drove me crazy while you were alive. Fuckin’ driving me crazy now you’re dead.”

“I’m here to help you, Jill. You and Zoey.”

She looks around the room like finally she believes that maybe, maybe I really am here and not some voice in her head. Like she’s trying to locate me, pin down the source of me. All she has to do, really, is to look at Zoey, who’s staring straight at me.

But she’s squinting in a way I’ve seen before. A way I don’t like.

“Well, you don’t have to worry about Zoey,” she says.

I’m about to ask her what she means by that when the doorbell rings. She stubs out the cigarette, walks over to the door and opens it. There’s a man in the hall I’ve never seen before. A small man, shy and sensitive looking, mid-thirties and balding, in a dark blue windbreaker. His posture says he’s uncomfortable.

“Mrs. Hunt?”

“Un-huh. Come on in,” she says. “She’s right over there.”

The man stoops and picks up something off the floor and I see what it is.

A cat-carrier. Plastic with a grated metal front. Just like ours. The man steps inside.

“Jill, what are you doing? What the hell are you doing, Jill?”

Her hands flutter to her ears as though she’s trying to bat away a fly or a mosquito and she blinks rapidly but the man doesn’t see that at all. The man is focused on my cat who remains focused on me, when she should be watching the man, when she should be seeing the cat-carrier, she knows damn well what they mean for godsakes, she’s going somewhere, somewhere she won’t like.

“Zoey! Go! Get out of here! Run!”

I clap my hands. They make no sound. But she hears the alarm in my voice and sees the expression I must be wearing and at the last instant turns toward the man just as he reaches for her, reaches down to the couch and snatches her up and shoves her head-first inside the carrier. Closes it. Engages the double-latches.

He’s fast. He’s efficient.

My cat is trapped inside.

The man smiles. He doesn’t quite pull it off.

“That wasn’t too bad,” he says.

“No. You’re lucky. She bites. She’ll put up a hell of a fight sometimes.”

“You lying bitch,” I tell her.

I’ve moved up directly behind her by now. I’m saying this into her ear. I can feel her heart pumping with adrenalin and I don’t know if it’s me who’s scaring her or what she’s just done or allowed to happen that’s scaring her but she’s all actress now, she won’t acknowledge me at all. I’ve never felt so angry or useless in my life.

“You sure you want to do this, ma’am?” he says. “We could put her up for adoption for a while. We don’t have to euthanize her. ’Course, she’s not a kitten anymore. But you never know. Some family…”

“I told you,” my wife of six years says. “She bites.”

And now she’s calm and cold as ice.

Zoey has begun meowing. My heart’s begun to break. Dying was easy compared to this.

Our eyes meet. There’s a saying that the soul of a cat is seen through its eyes and I believe it. I reach inside the carrier. My hand passes through the carrier. I can’t see my hand but she can. She moves her head up to nuzzle it. And the puzzled expression isn’t there anymore. It’s as though this time she can actually feel me, feel my hand and my touch. I wish I could feel her too. I petted her just this way when she was only a kitten, a street-waif, scared of every horn and siren. And I was all alone. She begins to purr. I find something out. Ghosts can cry.

So, you want to know about Sir Roderick Bentley, do you? Well, you’ve come to the right department, as they say. Thank you, I’ll have a large Bell’s Whisky, if I may. Plenty of soda. Ice? Good God, no! Yes, Roddy and I went back a long way, to the Old Vic days just after the war. No. No resentment. Roddy was always destined for great things, me for the supporting roles.

“Godders,” Roddy said to me once. He always called me “Godders” for some reason, but I prefer to be called Godfrey, if you don’t mind. That’s my name. “Godders, you’re a good actor. Devilish good, and you’ll always be in work. I’ll tell you why. You’re good but you haven’t enough personality to worry a leading man.” I’ll never forget that. Of course, I suppose I knew he was right, but that doesn’t mean to say it wasn’t an almighty sock in the jaw.

Well, when Roddy formed his own company, Navigator Productions, he asked me to be in it. Played some good parts—not leads or anything, of course—but I did understudy him quite a bit. In fact I understudied him in his last two productions, and thereby hangs a tale, as they say.

Want to know a funny thing about Roddy? He couldn’t stand cats. No, I know on it’s own that’s not particularly strange, but it is odd when you consider that in spite of that he always used to call his girlfriends “puss-cat.”

You don’t know about the girlfriends? Oh, perhaps I shouldn’t have said, but you were bound to find out in the end, weren’t you? But you won’t mention, will you, in this biography of yours that it was I who told you? I’d hate it to get back to Lady Margery that I said such a thing. I rather doubt that she knows, you see. Or perhaps she does and won’t admit it. Women are queer cattle. Ah, the drinks! Well, here’s to your book, eh?

Let me make it quite clear: Roddy was devoted to Lady Margery. Devoted. But, you know, when Margery started to have the kids she gave up the theatre. They had this lovely home down in Kent and she didn’t like to leave it just to go on tour with him or off to some godforsaken film location in Spain or California. So Roddy had his little adventures, but he always came home.

Now, I know what’s going through your mind. I’m not quite the drink-sodden old idiot you think I am, you see. You’ve got the neat psychological explanation all lined up, haven’t you? You think he despised these girlfriends of his, and as he hated cats he called them “puss-cat” out of some subconscious urge to put them down. But it’s rather more complicated than that. You see Roddy had three passions in life: the theatre, women and sailing. He had an absolute mania for messing about in boats and when he became rich and famous he bought this yacht which was his pride and joy. It was a catamaran, and do you know what he called it? Yes. “Puss-Cat.” So you see it wasn’t that simple. Roddy did a lot for his girls one way and another: he brought them on professionally, encouraged them. Some of them have had very good careers thanks to him. No, I’m not going to tell all you their names—you’ll have to find that out for yourself—but I’ll mention a couple of them perhaps, because they’re relevant to what you came to me for. I assume it was the last months of Roddy’s life that you wanted me to tell you about?

Thank you. Just another double Bell’s with soda and that’s my lot. I’ve always known my limit: key to success, knowing your limits, believe me. By the way, I’ll say it just once: this is my version of what happened. Others will tell you different, and it’s up to you to decide what the truth of the matter is, because at the end of the day your guess is as good as mine. Probably better actually. After all, you’re the writer, aren’t you?

Well, the year after Roddy got his “K” and became Sir Roderick, he took out a tour of Pinero’s The Magistrate and, of course, I was in it. I understudied him and played the nice little role of Wormington. Gets some good laughs in the third act, but you don’t want to hear about that, do you? Well naturally Roddy plays the title role of the Magistrate, Posket, and he was superb, believe me.

Do you know The Magistrate? It’s a good old-fashioned farce. No smut. Never fails: except with the critics who think it’s a bit dusty and dated. That’s why we didn’t come into the West-End with it, I’m convinced. Well, anyway, in this play there’s a rather nice part of a young music teacher called Beatie, and for it Roddy hires a young unknown actress, name of Yolande Carey. You’ve heard about her? Well, hold your horses, because believe me, you don’t know the half.

Yolande was a sweet little thing, just Roddy’s type as it happens. His type? Well, she was slender—“petite,” I suppose is the word—blonde with delicate features and a little turned-up nose. Looked as if she’d blow away in a light gale. That was Roddy’s type. Attraction of opposites, I suppose, because Roddy, as you know, was a big man with one hell of a physique. He was sixty-three at the time I’m talking about but if it wasn’t for the grey hair he could have passed for forty-five. Don’t get the idea though that Roddy picked Yolande just because he fancied her. He wasn’t like that. Yolande had talent, believe me, a bit raw, perhaps, and underpowered in the vocal department, but definitely there, and Roddy had spotted it at the audition.

I knew Roddy and I could tell from the start of rehearsals that he fancied her because he gave her such a hard time. Incidentally, Roddy was directing as well as playing the lead. That was not the usual practice, rather archaic, but still done, like the soloist conducting a piano concerto from the keyboard. But, dammit, Gielgud did it, Olivier did it, why not Roddy? He could be a bit of a bully, but, on the other hand, he always bullied the ones he cared about most, because he knew they had it in them to give more. Sometimes younger actors found that hard to understand; just as he failed to understand that some people just don’t respond well to bullying, Yolande being one of them. He kept on at her to project more, throw herself more into the role, until once or twice I could see she was close to tears.

I did my best to reassure Yolande but she thought I was just taking pity on her. When I tried a quiet word with Roddy about it he was very sharp with me, told me to mind my own something something business. I got the impression that he suspected me of being sweet on Yolande, but this wasn’t the case. Just to make things clear at the start, I’m gay: not a word I like terribly but the only one available these days. It was a fact about my life that Roddy always chose to ignore. You see, though I don’t deny it, I’m not open or obvious about it, and I was actually once married. She left me for a dentist: I won’t bore you with the details. Cheers!

Where was I? Yes, well, the Yolande-Roddy situation was resolved in a rather odd way. We were rehearsing for the tour in a run-down old Church Hall in Lambeth. It was a gruesome place, but it was cheap to hire. Roddy, like nearly all theatrical managements I’ve worked with, could be both very mean and very extravagant in the most unexpected directions, and the Church Hall was one of his false economies. It had Biblical texts on the walls; its windows were dirty; it got us down. It also had a resident cat, an ancient ginger Tom, called Charlie—God knows why I remember that, but I do!—the mangiest old bruiser you ever saw. Charlie had a habit of trotting into rehearsals at odd moments, and standing or sitting very still while he stared at proceedings; then he would start to howl. I think Charlie just wanted to be fed, but we all called him “The Critic”, because he did sometimes seem to be commenting on our attempts at comedy.

Needless to say, Roddy loathed Charlie, and one afternoon the animal started howling at a particularly tense moment in rehearsals. Roddy, who was trying to remember lines, lost his temper completely, rushed at Charlie and gave him the most almighty kick. Charlie let out an awful screech and Yolande, who was standing nearby, ran to pick him up. She was the only one of us who had shown any sort of soft spot for Charlie, the Critic. She cuddled the wretched old beast in her arms and absolutely tore a strip off Roddy for what he had done. Roddy stared at her in amazement. He said nothing, and I could see his mind working. Once I saw his mouth twitch into a smile, but he controlled himself. Having heard her out in silence he simply and graciously apologised to her. He said that what he had done was “unpardonable.” Yolande released Charlie, who had been clawing and struggling in her arms in the most ungrateful way. He dashed off and was never seen again.

That incident marked a turning point in relations between Roddy and Yolande. Her acting became bolder and more confident; Roddy’s criticisms became more muted. They ceased to be boss and junior employee and became colleagues. It was a great relief all round.

I don’t exactly know when their affair started, but I think it was fairly early on in the tour, and I suspect it was our second week which was at the Theatre Royal, Newcastle. Do you know it? Lovely old theatre.

On the Tuesday morning Yolande and I happened to meet Roddy at the stage door. We had just been in to see if there was any mail for us and, as it was a fine April day, we were standing outside talking about nothing in particular when Roddy appeared. I could see he was in one of his restless moods, and on the spur of the moment he proposed to take us out on a jaunt. He was going to show us Hadrian’s Wall, an idea which seemed to thrill Yolande, me less so. I’d been. However I went because it was clear from Roddy’s look that he wanted me there. I wasn’t quite sure why, but, you know, Roddy was a compulsive performer and liked an audience for practically everything he did, even seduction.

We drove out of Newcastle and followed the wall. It was one of those soft, mild days of spring, full of haze and new bird song when the pale green of the hills blended with the grey ribs and ridges of Roman wall and fortress. Yolande listened to Roddy with the rapt wonder of a schoolgirl as he explained the wall to her. We got out at Housesteads, the best preserved fort on the wall, and wandered about, almost the only people there. At one point Yolande asked about Hadrian himself, what sort of man was he? Roddy who, outside military history and dates, was less well informed, hesitated. So I gave them an account of the only thing I knew about Hadrian, his passion for the glamorous youth Antinous whose mysterious death blighted the Emperor’s later years. Yolande was puzzled.

“I didn’t know they had gays in those days,” she said. Roddy, who was standing behind her, looked at me and winked. I ignored him and went into some rubbish about the Greeks and Plato and Socrates. For the rest of the time we were out I felt very uneasy. Roddy was flirting with Yolande and completely ignoring me, while she was laughing at everything he said in that way people do when they meet Royalty or fall in love.

He drove us back to the theatre. At the stage door I noticed that the theatre cat, a black, green-eyed streak of feline cunning, had stretched out its lean body on the door step to catch the weak Newcastle sun. When he saw it, Roddy did a thing I’d never seen him do before. He crouched down and tentatively tickled the animal’s stomach.

“Hello, puss-cat,” he said with a rather unconvincing show of bonhomie. The cat ignored him, and Roddy looked up at Yolande.

He said: “I wonder, old thing. I’m going back to my hotel. I’ve got to look over that bit in the third act where I got in such a tangle last night. Remember? You wouldn’t be an absolute brick and come back with me for a cuppa and test me on my lines, would you?”

There was a little pause, just long enough for it to be made obvious that she knew what he meant and he knew that she knew, and, well, you know the rest. I thought for a moment she was going to turn him down rather huffily, but she didn’t; she simply said: “Okay,” and off they went.

I’m pretty sure that was the beginning of things, because after that one would often see them together in the wings or in the dressing room corridors, just talking. They weren’t touching or anything obvious like that and I’m sure they thought they were being incredibly discreet, but very soon the rumours were flying around. You know how these things are picked up amazingly quickly by a company on tour with nothing much to do except gossip about each other.

One thing that one of the other actresses in the company said stuck in my mind. She said: “I wonder what would happen if Bel knew.” Bel of course was Belinda Courteney. Yes, the Belinda Courteney. Yes, she was one of Roddy’s girls at one time, but don’t tell her I told you. I’m up for an interview for the National next week and you know how her writ runs there. As a matter of fact I thought the Bel Courteney affair was over, but apparently some thought otherwise.

Yolande occasionally confided in me. I suppose I was a safe pair of hands, and she knew I knew, so to speak. I tried to sound kindly and wise: you know how one slips into these roles, especially if one is an actor. I was dear old Uncle Godfrey to her, and, I’m afraid, to me too in those moments. Yolande was a sweet thing, but such a child. She had become obsessed by Roddy and used to ask me about every detail of his career, the books he liked, the food he preferred, everything. I honestly think she thought he was going to leave Lady Margery for her. She said: “You know he hasn’t slept with her for eight years.” I refrained from saying that that was what he told all the girls, because it was only a guess, but perhaps I should have done.

Well, the tour wound up fairly successfully in October at the Theatre Royal Richmond, traditionally one of those “last date before the West End” venues, but it was not to be. There had been talk of a West End Theatre several times in the tour, but it came to nothing. With such a huge cast we needed a thousand-seater-plus just to break even and all the big houses were stubbornly full of American musicals that year.

So the company disbanded, but Yolande and I kept in touch, partly because I sensed she needed someone to talk to about Roddy. Most of her other friends wouldn’t have understood. They were non-theatrical and, frankly, just a bit odd. They tended to call themselves “aromatherapists,” “Feng Shui consultants,” “musicians,” “spiritual healers”: all those euphemisms by which the barely employable salve the wound of their uselessness. Forgive me, my prejudice is showing; it must be the Bell’s.

She had a little flat above a patisserie in the St John’s Wood High Street. She’d ask me round at odd times of the day for a cup of herb tea and, if I was lucky, a slice of carrot cake, but the subject of conversation was always the same: Roddy. They were still seeing each other, and he occasionally used to take her away for weekends in Paris or Torquay—his boat was down at Torquay, you see—but after one or two visits he wouldn’t come to her flat any more. The excuse he gave was that he was allergic to her cat, and one can’t altogether blame him. I’m not myself averse to cats, but this one of Yolande’s, a rescued stray, was not a notably attractive specimen. It was an elderly, neutered Tom, brindled, with a sagging belly and a passion for tinned sardines. Yolande, you see, was one of those people who is instantly drawn to anything even more defenceless than herself.

Rather unwisely I think, Yolande called the cat Roddy. I don’t know whether she actually addressed the cat as such in the other Roddy’s presence, but it would explain his allergy if she did.

I was managing to keep myself alive by the odd voice-over, and a beer commercial, but by the end of November Yolande was beginning to be rather uncomfortably out of work. She had some sort of part-time employment at a nearby book shop which didn’t bring in much, but it wasn’t just the money. Acting is a drug: once you become addicted, you need a regular fix. Yolande told me that Roddy had offered to “lend” her some money which she had indignantly refused, and he was beginning to see less of her. In December he went away for some filming in Spain; then just before Christmas something happened which lifted her out of the gloom she was falling into. She had a Christmas Card from Roddy, and there was a message in it.

Excitedly she asked me round for herb tea to see the card. She wouldn’t say anything more on the phone, so I came. I had barely taken a sip of Dandelion and Chamomile—a filthy concoction, take my word, don’t go near the stuff—before she had thrust the Actor’s Benevolent Fund card into my hand. Inside it read as follows:

“Darling Puss-Cat,

“Filming here nearly over. Shan’t be sorry. Ghastly Spanish food swimming in oil. Fell off a horse yesterday in full armour. No joke. Puss-Cat, I’m taking out a Spring Tour of King Lear next year and I’ve done a deal which guarantees us a West End Theatre. The long and the short of it is I want you to be my Cordelia. What say you?

“Your ever loving,

“Roddy”

I have to confess that my first reaction was a typical actor’s one: jealousy. He was taking out a tour of King Lear and there were plenty of parts for me—Kent, perhaps even Gloucester—why hadn’t Roddy been in touch about it? But this was no time to feel hurt; Yolande was asking me what she should do. I said it was obvious. She should get her agent to contact the Navigator Productions office and accept the offer. Yolande said she had already done that.

Then there was a long laborious discussion in which she went on about her utter inadequacy for the role—she had never done Shakespeare professionally—and I, as I was expected to do, reassured her that she would make a splendid Cordelia. I thought it might be tactless to remark that one of her main qualifications for the part was the fact that she was a light girl, only just over seven stone. The elderly actor playing Lear, you see, must carry Cordelia on stage at the end of the play, so weight is a consideration, especially in a long run, and it was one of which I am sure Roddy had been mindful.

Well, that seemed to be that. I didn’t hear much from Yolande till after Christmas. Then she began to be a bit worried because Roddy had not been in touch with her. This was the arrangement, you see. She was not allowed to ring him in case Lady Margery answered the phone: he would always call her. More worrying perhaps than that, there had been no response from the Navigator Productions office about her acceptance of Cordelia. This puzzled me because by this time my agent had been notified that Roddy was “interested” in me for the part of Kent.

Early in January Roddy asked me over to the Navigator Offices just off the Charing Cross Road to “talk about Kent.” I knew this amounted to a firm offer, so I went eagerly and found him welcoming and friendly as always, but, I thought, a little distracted. We discussed the production and my part which he described as “hell’s important” and “absolutely key.” We also discussed the salary he was offering. He apologised profusely that it couldn’t be higher; in fact he seemed so distressed about it that in the end I began to feel guilty, as if I had gone in asking for more money than he could afford which, of course, I hadn’t. In the end, to relieve the tension, I said:

“I gather Yolande is going to be your Cordelia.”

Roddy’s reaction was most unexpected. He looked at me with a shocked, almost fearful expression, as if something poisonous had just bitten him.

“What the hell are you on about, Godders?” he said.

Now, I didn’t want to admit that I’d read a private Christmas card so I was a bit vague at first, but Roddy simply didn’t understand. In the end I had to tell him explicitly that she had shown me the message from him. Even then, it was quite some time before he reacted. Then it was as if a flash from a bolt of lightning had suddenly bleached his face.

Roddy said: “Oh, my God! Oh, my Christ! Oh, my golly gosh!” Then, after a long pause, he said in a quiet, thoughtful sort of a way: “Oh, fuck!”

I waited patiently for the explanation. At last he sighed, as if these things had been sent to try him and he told me:

“I wrote all my bloody Christmas cards in Spain. I thought it would be something to do. You know the waiting around that goes on, especially when you’re filming one of these ghastly Hollywood Epics. I can remember writing all the cards, then I got a tummy bug from some fearful Spanish muck they served us. Well, the doc, under instructions from the director of course, just drugged me up to the eyeballs so I could get onto that bloody horse again. It was while I was under the influence that I did the envelopes for the cards. I do vaguely remember doing Bel Courteney’s at the same time as Yolande’s—”

I got his drift. “You mean the offer of Cordelia was meant for Belinda Courteney? You put the card in the wrong envelope?”

“Yes. Dammit! Yes! I’ve been wondering why Bel hadn’t responded. In fact… Oh, buggeration and hell!”

He seemed even more upset than before and I asked him what was the matter. At last I got it out of him that the card he had intended for Yolande contained a suggestion, couched in the gentlest possible terms, that perhaps in future they might be seeing rather less of each other than before.

I said: “You mean, you might have sent the brush-off for Yolande to Belinda by mistake as well?” Roddy started rubbing his face with his hands so he wouldn’t have to look at me. By this time, I was almost as upset as he was. I said: “But you called her puss-cat.”

“Who?”

“Yolande—I mean Belinda.”

“Yes. Yes! They’re all called puss-cat.” He seemed very irritated that I had brought the matter up. Then he became all abject and apologetic which was almost worse. He said: “Look, Godfrey, dear old thing, would you do me the most enormous favour? Would you try to break all this to Yolande? And do it gently, won’t you, dear old boy. I know you will. You’re such a brick. The fact is I just can’t face it at the moment. I’m up to here with Lear, as you can imagine, and I’ve got to try and sort things out with Belinda.”

I said: “Are you sure you wouldn’t like me to tackle her as well?”

Roddy didn’t react; he just shook his head solemnly. “No, thanks. That’s awfully decent, but I have to do that myself.” My attempts at irony have always fallen on deaf ears. Not so much esprit de l’escalier as esprit de corpse, eh? Oh, never mind. So I agreed to see Yolande for him. Of course I agreed. You can’t just fall out of love with someone after forty years. At least, I can’t.

I thought of telling Yolande by phone or even a letter, but in the end I decided to go to see her: it seemed the only decent thing to do. Well, we got sat down with the herb tea and everything and the cat Roddy purring on her lap and I began to explain. It was horrible because she found it so hard to take it in. I had to say everything twice. She didn’t rage, or throw things, or spit with hatred or anything—I would have preferred that—she just listened with a baffled expression on her face. There were no sobs, but her eyes were wet with tears. She kept saying: “But why? Does he hate me or something?” And I said “No,” very loudly and firmly, because I was sure he didn’t. Then she asked me to explain about the card yet again, so I did.

She nodded a few times before she said: “So he doesn’t want me to be his Cordelia?”

I shook my head. There was a bit of a pause, then she came out with something which jolly nearly broke me up. She said: “I’d started learning the lines.”

Oh, God! You wouldn’t understand, would you? You’re not an actor.

Well, we began work on Lear and I rather lost touch with Yolande. Rehearsals were engrossing and I had the feeling she would not want to hear about them. Incidentally, Belinda Courteney did not play Cordelia—it was the year of her groundbreaking Hedda Gabler at the National—and the girl who did was no better and no worse than Yolande might have been. Roddy was on top form as Lear and I think everyone who saw him agrees that he gave the performance of his life. The rest of the cast was good, the set was functional and, though the costumes belonged to the then-fashionable “Ruritanian Stalinist” school, they did at least fit. We opened fairly triumphantly in, of all places, Blackpool.

There was a six week pre-West End tour and I must admit that I completely forgot about Yolande until the last week at Cardiff when, half an hour before curtain up on the Thursday I was summoned through the loudspeaker in my dressing room to the phone at the stage door. There was a call for me.

It was one of Yolande’s odd friends—the aromatherapist, I think—and how she had managed to track me down to the Theatre Royal Cardiff, I do not know. She told me that the previous day the couple in the flat above Yolande’s had heard this howling and scratching on the door of Yolande’s flat, obviously the wretched cat Roddy in some distress. They tried calling Yolande but got no reply. To cut a long story short, the police were summoned and when they broke down the door they found Yolande lying on the bed, dead. She’d taken enough barbiturates to kill a horse. Roddy the cat had gone frantic with hunger and everything and the place stank of his poo, but he hadn’t touched Yolande’s body.

I went through the performance that night in a daze, wondering when and how I should tell Roddy. In the end I funked it altogether. The following evening I was standing in the wings waiting to go on and begin the play when I became aware of Roddy lurking behind me.

He said: “You’ve heard about Yolande?” I nodded. He said: “I’ve been rather knocked endways by it all. The Company Office rang and told me this afternoon. Someone there had seen a paragraph in the Evening Standard. I can’t understand it, can you?”

I shook my head.

“I mean, I know she was out of work and all that, but… She must have had some sort of mental trouble. A breakdown. Terrible. She was a dear, sweet thing. Not without talent.” There was a pause, then he said: “You know, Godders, I hate to say it, but young people today, they don’t seem to have the backbone. They give up too easily. I mean, we’ve all had our bad patches in this profession, God knows, but you need a bit of grit and spunk to stick to it. Don’t you agree?” To my shame I nodded and Roddy gave me a great bear hug.

The next minute the lights had gone up on stage and I was striding into another world as Kent and uttering the first words of the play: “I thought the King had more affected the Duke of Albany than Cornwall.”

Roddy never mentioned Yolande again in my presence, but I believe there was a moment that night at the end of the play when perhaps he remembered her. It came in the final scene when he is on the ground, lamenting over the dead body of Cordelia and I am in attendance, and he says the words:

“A plague upon you, murderers, traitors all!

I might have saved her; now she’s gone for ever.”

At that moment he did something he’d never done before, he looked up at me. There were tears in his eyes, and they were not stage tears. I like to think they weren’t.

So we moved to our London venue, the Irving Theatre in The Strand, for a limited run of three months, and the critics fortunately decided that Roddy was a great Lear. All the same, after the exhilaration of the tour when we were all discovering how good the show was, the West End run seemed to be a bit flat, and, of course, because in London most of the cast had their own homes to go to and their own lives to lead, some of the camaraderie in the company went too.

I didn’t particularly like the Irving. It’s big, draughty old Victorian building, perhaps even a little sinister, and it had, of course, a theatre cat. They’re vital things you know, because theatres get rats, and rats gnaw cables, and gnawed electric cables start fires, especially in theatres. The Irving cat was a black Tom called Nimrod, not a very sociable beast, but, as befitted his name, a “mighty hunter before the Lord” who kept the rats and mice down very effectively. But here’s a funny thing: about a week into our run Nimrod disappeared.

The theatre manager was very distressed and offered a reward for his discovery and return. There was even a bit in the papers about it. I wouldn’t have mentioned this only it may have a bearing on what happened next.

Fortunately, the disappearance of Nimrod did not result in a rodent invasion. In fact—and this was something that puzzled many of us—the odd half-eaten rat or mouse could still be found in odd corners of the theatre, if anything with more frequency than before Nimrod’s vanishing act. These grisly remains, which had been left around by Nimrod as tokens of his prowess, were now nearly always to be found either in the wings or in the corridor leading to Dressing Room Number 1, Roddy’s of course. In fact Roddy came in one day for a matinee to find a headless rat carefully placed on the very threshold of Number 1. He made a terrific fuss about that, as he had every right to, of course, but I thought there was a touch of hysteria in his manner which was uncharacteristic. He didn’t usually play the Prima Donna.

A couple of days later Roddy happened to meet me back stage in the interval and invited me to his dressing room for a whisky. The one he poured himself was unusually large. He’d never been a boozer, and certainly not during a show. He seemed to be under some sort of strain.

Having sat me down, he said: “Now, then, Godders, what are we going to do about this cat business?” I looked blank. He said: “Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed this damned cat which keeps following me around the theatre?”

I said that I hadn’t seen any cat and anyway—didn’t he know?—Nimrod had disappeared. Roddy banged his glass impatiently down on the dressing table.

“Yes! Yes! I know all about Nimrod. That damn theatre manager is obsessed with Nimrod. I didn’t mind Nimrod. He kept out of your way and did his job. This is a different cat altogether. It won’t leave me alone. It keeps coming up to me just as I’m going on stage and purring, and doing that thing that cats do, you know, curling itself round your legs. It nearly tripped me up the other day just as I was going on for ‘Blow Winds!’ It’s a blasted nuisance. And it keeps leaving these offerings for me in my dressing room. You know, bits of disemboweled rat and mouse. I trod on an intestine with my bare foot the other day as I was changing. Ugh! I can’t think how the bugger gets in. I always lock my dressing room when I go. I suppose it must be the cleaners. I’ve spoken to the manager about it but he hasn’t a clue. He’s so obsessed about Nimrod I don’t think he believes in this other cat.”

I asked what it looked like.

“Funny sort of colour. I don’t know. Greyish, I think, but these sort of yellow eyes which look as if they light up in the dark. You know how some cats seem to have luminous eyes. It’s difficult to tell exactly what it looks like because I haven’t seen it in full light. It usually turns up in the wings, just outside the glare of the stage lights. I wouldn’t mind only—I know this is a funny thing to say—it’s so damned fond of me. It’s obsessed. It’s like, you know, some creepy sort of stalker. Godders, you must have seen it.”

There was pleading in his voice, but I had to confess that I hadn’t. To reassure him I said I said I would keep “a weather eye” open for it. He liked that: a nautical expression, you see, “weather eye.”

In the final scene that night an odd thing happened. Lear has come on with the dead body of Cordelia and we’re standing around. Roddy was doing pretty well, but not on top form, I thought. He kept looking off-stage. Then comes his final speech when he is lamenting over the dead Cordelia and he says:

“Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life,

And thou no breath at all?”

Except that this night he doesn’t quite say that, he says:

“Why should a dog, a horse, a cat have life,

And thou no breath at all?”

And his eyes are fixed on something off-stage right in the wings. Well, I couldn’t resist looking there myself. I was half-dazzled by the stage lights so I can’t be sure, but do you know for a second or two somewhere in the gloom I thought I did catch sight of two yellow cat’s eyes staring at the action on stage. Well, I can’t be sure because I had to get back to my job. I still had lines to say, but when I’d said my last ones—you remember—

“I have a journey, sir, shortly to go;

My master calls me, I must not say no.”—I look back into the wings, and there’s nothing there. The eyes had gone.

Next day was a matinee day and before the first house Roddy summoned me to his dressing room. He seemed very excited.

He said: “I think I’ve got a way to nail the little bugger. You see this?” He held up a transparent plastic phial, the kind you pee into for doctors. It had about a centimetre of white powder in it. “Know what that is?” He didn’t wait for my answer. “Strychnine. Don’t ask me how I got it. Had to pull a few strings. One of the few advantages of being ‘Sir Roderick’ is that you can occasionally pull a string or two. I’m going to put it in some milk and put the milk in a saucer in my dressing room and when that damn cat comes, it is going to drink that milk. All cats like milk, don’t they?”

I said I was no expert, but I understood that cats liked milk.

He said: “Right! That damn cat’s going to die and all our troubles are over!”

I couldn’t help feeling that Roddy had got things rather out of proportion, but he seemed exhilarated and that afternoon a slightly sparse audience got the performance of a lifetime. By the end of it Roddy was clearly exhausted, which worried me, but something was keeping him alight. He seemed—what’s the word I’m looking for?—febrile, that’s it, and it worried me.

That was why I decided to look in on him in his dressing room just before the half-hour call for the evening show. I knocked on the door which was slightly ajar but got no reply, so I looked in.

Roddy had not got out of his last act costume or his make-up. He was lying on the floor of his dressing room, arms outstretched. He didn’t look to me as if he was breathing. Beside him on the floor was an empty bowl. At the corners of his half-open mouth were little droplets of liquid which looked to me like milk.

But that was not the worst of it. Crouched on his chest was the biggest damned cat I’ve ever seen in my life. Its fur was shaggy and grey—it looked like a great ball of dirty smoke—and its angry eyes were a bright sulphur yellow. Slowly it arched its back and gave me a low, stertorous hiss like the sudden escape of steam from an engine under pressure.

You don’t believe me? Well, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

I ran to get the Company Stage Manager and when we got back to Number One dressing room, Roddy was still there on the floor, but the cat had gone. We phoned for an ambulance and they carted him off to hospital but it wasn’t any good. He was dead as mutton: heart failure apparently. I said nothing about the strychnine business because I thought it would only muddy the waters, and it probably wasn’t relevant.

That night, for the first and last time in my life, I went on for Roddy as King Lear. Did I tell you I was his understudy? Made a pretty good fist of it too, though I says it as shouldn’t. Standing ovation and all that.

“Godders,” Roddy used to say to me, “you’re a good actor. Devilish good, but you haven’t enough personality to worry a leading man.” Well, he should have seen me that night! What? Another Bell’s? Oh, all right, just this once, since you’re twisting my arm. Cheers!

I was once a respectable woman. Oh, yes, I know that’s what they all say when they’ve reached a pass like mine: I was well educated, well traveled, had lovely children and a nice husband with a good financial mind. How can anyone have fallen so far, except one who deserved to anyway? I’ve had time aplenty to consider the matter, lying here eyeless in this fine hospital bed while the stench of my wounds increases. The matrons who guard my room are tight-lipped. But I heard one of them whisper yesterday, when she thought I was asleep, “Jesus, how could anyone do such a thing?” The answer to all these questions is the same. I have fallen so far, and I have done what I have done, to save us each and every one from the Cat in Glass.

Heian Japan

In the reign of she who became known as the Dark Willow Empress, there lived in a far-off city a poet by the name of Ga-sho. He lived as all poor poets do, upon memories and tea-dregs, but what sustained him most of all were thoughts of a certain young woman, a maid to a lady-in-waiting to the Dark Willow Empress. This young woman had no name, at least none that Ga-sho knew of. He had glimpsed her only once, as she followed the litter bearing her mistress along a canal and then over a bridge at the city’s edge. The hem of her kimono was spattered with mud and rotten waterweeds, but her face—what he could see of it, anyway, as she kept her head down and her long sleeve held before her cheeks—was exquisite, with skin as fine and white as rice paper and long-lashed eyes like chrysanthemum blossoms. As he stood aside on the bridge to let her pass, he caught the strong fragrance of kurobo, sweet incense, trailing her like a warm wind. For this reason, and the beauty of her eyes, in his thoughts he called her Fair Flower.

Ga-sho had inherited a small sum after his father’s death, enough to keep a tiny room in the very darkest quarter of the city. Here, before a brazier no bigger than his cupped hands, Ga-sho wrote his poems upon scrolls of rice paper. All of his verses praised Fair Flower’s beauty, her gentleness, her devotion and her virtue (though mostly he wrote of her beauty). He did not know that the young woman he loved was in fact bad-tempered and shrill, with a voice like green sticks breaking; that she gambled with the other maids and had amassed a considerable debt, which she had absolutely no intention of paying; that she snored, and her breath often stank of plum wine, even in the morning; that she had for some time now been trysting with a handsome gardener in the Dark Willow Empress’s employ; and that she dallied also with the gardener’s cousin, and occasionally with the cousin’s best friend, who worked in the lower kitchen. (The name they had for her was less flattering than “Fair Flower,” and I will not reveal it here.)

No, Ga-sho’s poems took none of this into account, and that is perhaps for the best. That which is true often makes for very dull reading.

Poor as he was, Ga-sho kept a cat. She was a fastidious creature, bobtailed as cats of that time and place were, with pale grey eyes and black front paws; not as beautiful as Fair Flower, perhaps, but with far better manners. The most remarkable thing about her was her color: a strange, deep reddish brown, the color of new bronze tinged with blood. Such red cats were considered to have special powers by the superstitious, and were called Kinkwaneko, Golden Flower, but Ga-Sho, while a sentimental sort when it came to women, was not particularly superstitious. He called her Clean-ears.

The red cat slept beside Ga-sho and kept him warm at night. In the morning, she gently woke him by nudging his cheek. When the poet ate, he always saved bits of fish for his companion. When he had little money for food, or forgot to eat, Clean-ears would slip silently as a sigh from his tiny room and make her way to the city docks. An hour or so later she would return, bearing a fish, or perhaps a prawn, that she would lay upon the poet’s wooden pillow. Always she would politely refuse to dine until he was finished, and in return he was careful to save for her the choicest parts of the head, particularly the eyes, to which the red cat was very partial.

One of the few people Ga-sho could afford to do business with was an inkmaker whose shop was not far from the poet’s cramped room. The inkmaker was a poor man himself, but poverty had made him neither kindly nor patient toward those who owed him money. Rather, he was mean-spirited, craven to those with more wealth than his meager savings, and to one person at least he was downright cruel.

This was his stepdaughter, Ukon. He had married her mother under the misprision that she had a small fortune; upon discovering that she did not, he had hounded her to her death (or so it was believed in that part of the city, where gossip ran hot and destructive as the fires that often broke out during the winter months). Ukon’s mother was also reputed to have been a fox-fairy, and for several weeks after she died the inkmaker kept a cudgel by his bed, in case her vengeful spirit returned to harm him.

But either because she was not a fairy, or because she feared for her daughter’s well-being, the ghost did not appear, and poor Ukon was left alone to her fate. Neighbors could hear her piteous cries late at night when her stepfather beat her—bamboo-and rice-paper walls do little to hide such things—but no one moved to help her. A man’s daughter, even a stepdaughter, was his own concern. So, as her father spent his days and nights drinking with his customers and creditors, the brunt of the work of making ink was left to his stepdaughter.

It was Ukon who tended to the small stove where red pine wood and red pine resin were burned, all through the autumn and winter months. It was Ukon who then scraped the resulting soot from inside the stove, placing it in a bowl to which she added fish glue. The fish glue she made herself, begging fish bones from the docks, then boiling them on another stove. It smelled horrible, so she added plum and peony blossoms, and sometimes even sandalwood, if she could afford it. She mixed the fish glue and the soot together on a wide wooden plank, kneading the thick paste until it became soft and pliable as sweet rice cakes, then pressed the soft ink into wooden pattern blocks, square and round and rectangular. But the ink could not be left in the pattern molds, or it would crack as it dried. Ukon had to very carefully remove the blocks of ink, transferring them to wooden boxes filled with damp charcoal. Here the sumi ink would dry slowly, for days or even weeks, and Ukon had to replace the charcoal as it dried. Finally the sumi was dry enough to be wrapped in rice paper and hung to cure for another month, in the little shed in the alley behind the shop where she and her stepfather lived. Only then would Ukon carefully mark each sumi stick with her stepfather’s mark, wrap it in fine paper, and pile them all in neat stacks in the rear of the little shop. Her hands and fingers had become so stained by sumi ink that they never washed clean, nor did the rank smell of fish bones ever leave her skin; rather than help her, though, her drunken stepfather only mocked the girl.

“You will never win a suitor,” he said disdainfully, staring at her black hands. “I will be lucky if you don’t frighten away the few customers we have—”

And he cuffed her fiercely on the cheek, sending her reeling back to where the largest ink blocks awaited cutting.

Now, I have written that no one ever moved to help Ukon, but that is not quite true. Because the girl, poor and miserable as she was, yet possessed a kind heart, and like the half-strangled rosebush that still reaches toward a thread of sunlight, so did Ukon strive toward charity. As there was not a single human being in that quarter as poor and unhappy as she, Ukon’s kindnesses by necessity were directed toward other creatures, smaller and even hungrier than herself. So she would rescue crippled crickets trapped in their bamboo cages when the boys grew bored with them and tossed them aside, and save grains of rice to feed half-starved sparrows in the winter snow. And she would secretly feed a cat that often showed up in the alley behind the shop, a small red cat with a puffy bobbed tail like a blossom past its prime. It was drawn like other strays by the smell of rotting fish that rose from the ink shed. But it was smaller than the other cats, and milder-tempered, and Ukon made a point of saving fishtails for it, and fish bones with bits of flesh still adhering to them like hairs to a brittle comb.

It was on one such afternoon, late of a winter day in the Eleventh, or Frosty, Month, that Ukon made one of her furtive forays into the alleyway.

“Ah, suteneko,” she crooned, stooping to stroke the red cat behind its ears. “Poor suteneko, pretty Kinkwa-neko—you are so cold! Here—there is hardly anything, but…”

She held out her ink-blackened fingers, and the cat licked the flakes of fish from them gratefully.

“She’s not a stray, you know.”

Ukon whirled, frightened, and backed against the flimsy wall of the shed. She lowered her head automatically, as she would in deference to any customer, but she also raised her arm, as though to protect herself from a blow.

Peering through her fingers she saw not the threatening figure of her drunken father, but a young man in frayed robes and worn wooden shoes.

The poet, she thought, recognizing him by the ink stains on his sleeves and his hollow cheeks. Slowly she lowered her hand, but remained where she huddled against the wall, heedless of the sleet pelting down on her bare head.

“She stays with me,” the poet went on matter-of-factly. “Suteneko!” he said chidingly, and bent to pick up the cat. “She thinks you’re a stray!”

He stroked her head, blowing into her pointed ears, then looked at Ukon. “I call her Kuri-ryoumimi,” he said. “Kury-ri.”

“Ah.” Ukon smiled tentatively “‘Clean-ears.’”

The poet smiled back at her. But his smile died as he took in her blackened hands and red face—red and chafed from crying, and still bearing the marks of her stepfather’s blows. “I… I was in the shop, but saw no one,” he said apologetically. “I need some more ink. But I can come back tomorrow—”

“No, no,” Ukon cried, and hurried back inside. “My father is gone on an errand”—in fact, he was drinking at the tavern—“but I will get whatever you need.”

She busied herself with finding and wrapping several rectangular blocks of ink. The poet had asked for the cheapest kind, which was all he could afford, but as she began to pull the ink from its shelf, Ukon suddenly hesitated. She glanced over her shoulder to make sure he could not see, and that no other customers had entered the shop. Then she swiftly replaced the inexpensive sumi stick with a chrysanthemum-shaped block of the most expensive ink her stepfather sold, scented with geranium leaves, and tinted a deep vermillion. She wrapped it in a second sheet of rice paper, so that the poet would not see its value and refuse it. Then she hurried back to the front of the shop.

“Here,” she said, bowing as she handed it to him.

And as she gazed at him, her face reddened even more, though not from fear or pain. The poet took the sumi ink and stared back at her musingly.

She is nothing like Fair Flower, Ga-sho thought. There is no fragrance here but the reek of boiling fish guts, and her hands are black as my cat’s paws, and her skin is as red as—well, as red as Clean-ears’s fur. And everyone says the old man beats her…

And yet her smile was sweet, her voice low, her gaze gentle. And she had shown kindness to a stray cat….

“Thank you,” he said, too quickly, then turned and left.

That night Ga-sho wrote a poem in praise of the inkmaker’s daughter. He could not, in good conscience, compare her to a flower, or even a blossoming weed. But the Japanese have many poems that honor cats, and so he began by comparing her to Clean-ears. After some time spent thus, his thoughts began to move from feline virtues to more feminine ones, and he found himself composing verse that (to his own mind, at least) was at least as fine as those poems inspired by Fair Flower. He recited the best of these several times to Clean-ears, who sat washing her paws (which became no whiter than Ukon’s palms) beside the lamp.

He took a sheet of paper, withdrew the sumi stick he had bought that afternoon, and unwrapped it.

“Ah!”

The poet’s eyes grew wide and wondering. He held up the blossom-shaped ink block, glossy, with a telltale reddish tinge. He felt his cheeks grow hot, and looked furtively aside at the cat, as though to make sure she did not notice his blush.

But the cat was gone. And so, smiling to himself as he ground the vermillion ink on his inkstone and licked the sable tip of his brush, Ga-sho began to record his poem.

I first saw Mr. Legere when the circus swung through Steubenville, but I’d only been with the show for two weeks; he might have been making his irregular visits indefinitely. No one much wanted to talk about Mr. Legere, not even that last night when it seemed that the world was coming to an end—the night that Mr. Indrasil disappeared.

But if I’m going to tell it to you from the beginning, I should start by saying that I’m Eddie Johnston, and I was born and raised in Sauk City. Went to school there, had my first girl there, and worked in Mr. Lillie’s five-and-dime there for a while after I graduated from high school. That was a few years back… more than I like to count, sometimes. Not that Sauk City’s such a bad place; hot, lazy summer nights sitting on the front porch is all right for some folks, but it just seemed to itch me, like sitting in the same chair too long. So I quit the five-and-dime and joined Farnum & Williams’ All-American 3-Ring Circus and Side Show. I did it in a moment of giddiness when the calliope music kind of fogged my judgment, I guess.

So I became a roustabout, helping put up tents and take them down, spreading sawdust, cleaning cages, and sometimes selling cotton candy when the regular salesman had to go away and bark for Chips Baily, who had malaria and sometimes had to go someplace far away, and holler. Mostly things that kids do for free passes—things I used to do when I was a kid. But times change. They don’t seem to come around like they used to.

We swung through Illinois and Indiana that hot summer, and the crowds were good and everyone was happy. Everyone except Mr. Indrasil. Mr. Indrasil was never happy. He was the lion tamer, and he looked like old pictures I’ve seen of Rudolph Valentino. He was tall, with handsome, arrogant features and a shock of wild black hair. And strange, mad eyes—the maddest eyes I’ve ever seen. He was silent most of the time; two syllables from Mr. Indrasil was a sermon. All the circus people kept a mental as well as a physical distance, because his rages were legend. There was a whispered story about coffee spilled on his hands after a particularly difficult performance and a murder that was almost done to a young roustabout before Mr. Indrasil could be hauled off him. I don’t know about that. I do know that I grew to fear him worse than I had cold-eyed Mr. Edmont, my high school principal, Mr. Lillie, or even my father, who was capable of cold dressing-downs that would leave the recipient quivering with shame and dismay.

When I cleaned the big cats’ cages, they were always spotless. The memory of the few times I had the vituperative wrath of Mr. Indrasil called down on me still have the power to turn my knees watery in retrospect.

Mostly it was his eyes—large and dark and totally blank. The eyes, and the feeling that a man capable of controlling seven watchful cats in a small cage must be part savage himself.

And the only two things he was afraid of were Mr. Legere and the circus’s one tiger, a huge beast called Green Terror.

As I said, I first saw Mr. Legere in Steubenville, and he was staring into Green Terror’s cage as if the tiger knew all the secrets of life and death.

He was lean, dark, quiet. His deep, recessed eyes held an expression of pain and brooding violence in their green-flecked depths, and his hands were always crossed behind his back as he stared moodily in at the tiger.

Green Terror was a beast to be stared at. He was a huge, beautiful specimen with a flawless striped coat, emerald eyes, and heavy fangs like ivory spikes. His roars usually filled the circus grounds—fierce, angry, and utterly savage. He seemed to scream defiance and frustration at the whole world.

Chips Baily, who had been with Farnum & Williams since Lord knew when, told me that Mr. Indrasil used to use Green Terror in his act, until one night when the tiger leaped suddenly from its perch and almost ripped his head from his shoulders before he could get out of the cage. I noticed that Mr. Indrasil always wore his hair long down the back of his neck.

I can still remember the tableau that day in Steubenville. It was hot, sweatingly hot, and we had a shirtsleeve crowd. That was why Mr. Legere and Mr. Indrasil stood out. Mr. Legere, standing silently by the tiger cage, was fully dressed in a suit and vest, his face unmarked by perspiration. And Mr. Indrasil, clad in one of his beautiful silk shirts and white whipcord breeches, was staring at them both, his face dead-white, his eyes bulging in lunatic anger, hate, and fear. He was carrying a currycomb and brush, and his hands were trembling as they clenched on them spasmodically.

Suddenly he saw me, and his anger found vent. “You!” He shouted. “Johnston!”

“Yes, sir?” I felt a crawling in the pit of my stomach. I knew I was about to have the wrath of Indrasil vented on me, and the thought turned me weak with fear. I like to think I’m as brave as the next, and if it had been anyone else, I think I would have been fully determined to stand up for myself. But it wasn’t anyone else. It was Mr. Indrasil, and his eyes were mad.

“These cages, Johnston. Are they supposed to be clean?” He pointed a finger, and I followed it. I saw four errant wisps of straw and an incriminating puddle of hose water in the far corner of one.

“Y-yes, sir,” I said, and what was intended to be firmness became palsied bravado.

Silence, like the electric pause before a downpour. People were beginning to look, and I was dimly aware that Mr. Legere was staring at us with his bottomless eyes.

“Yes, sir?” Mr. Indrasil thundered suddenly. “Yes, sir? Yes, sir? Don’t insult my intelligence, boy! Don’t you think I can see? Smell? Did you use the disinfectant?”

“I used disinfectant yes—”

“Don’t answer me back!” He screeched, and then the sudden drop in his voice made my skin crawl. “Don’t you dare answer me back.” Everyone was staring now. I wanted to retch, to die. “Now you get the hell into that tool shed, and you get that disinfectant and swab out those cages,” he whispered, measuring every word. One hand suddenly shot out, grasping my shoulder. “And don’t you ever, ever, speak back to me again.”

I don’t know where the words came from, but they were suddenly there, spilling off my lips. “I didn’t speak back to you, Mr. Indrasil, and I don’t like you saying I did. I—resent it. Now let me go.”

His face went suddenly red, then white, then almost saffron with rage. His eyes were blazing doorways to hell.

Right then I thought I was going to die.

He made an inarticulate gagging sound, and the grip on my shoulder became excruciating. His right hand went up… up… up, and then descended with unbelievable speed.

If that hand had connected with my face, it would have knocked me senseless at best. At worst, it would have broken my neck.

It did not connect.

Another hand materialized magically out of space, right in front of me. The two straining limbs came together with a flat smacking sound. It was Mr. Legere.

“Leave the boy alone,” he said emotionlessly.

Mr. Indrasil stared at him for a long second, and I think there was nothing so unpleasant in the whole business as watching the fear of Mr. Legere and the mad lust to hurt (or to kill!) mix in those terrible eyes.

Then he turned and stalked away.

I turned to look at Mr. Legere. “Thank you,” I said.

“Don’t thank me.” And it wasn’t a “don’t thank me,” but a “don’t thank me.” Not a gesture of modesty but a literal command. In a sudden flash of intuition—empathy if you will—I understood exactly what he meant by that comment. I was a pawn in what must have been a long combat between the two of them. I had been captured by Mr. Legere rather than Mr. Indrasil. He had stopped the lion tamer not because he felt for me, but because it gained him an advantage, however slight, in their private war.

“What’s your name?” I asked, not at all offended by what I had inferred. He had, after all, been honest with me.

“Legere,” he said briefly. He turned to go.

“Are you with a circus?” I asked, not wanting to let him go so easily. “You seemed to know—him.”

A faint smile touched his thin lips, and warmth kindled in his eyes for a moment; “No. You might call me a—policeman.” And before I could reply, he had disappeared into the surging throng passing by.

The next day we picked up stakes and moved on.

I saw Mr. Legere again in Danville and, two weeks later, in Chicago. In the time between I tried to avoid Mr. Indrasil as much as possible and kept the cat cages spotlessly clean. On the day before we pulled out for St. Louis, I asked Chips Baily and Sally O’Hara, the red-headed wire walker, if Mr. Legere and Mr. Indrasil knew each other. I was pretty sure they did, because Mr. Legere was hardly following the circus to eat our fabulous lime ice.

Sally and Chips looked at each other over their coffee cups. “No one knows much about what’s between those two,” she said. “But it’s been going on for a long time, maybe twenty years. Ever since Mr. Indrasil came over from Ringling Brothers, and maybe before that.”

Chips nodded. “This Legere guy picks up the circus almost every year when we swing through the Midwest and stays with us until we catch the train for Florida in Little Rock. Makes old Leopard Man touchy as one of his cats.”

“He told me he was a policeman,” I said. “What do you suppose he looks for around here? You don’t suppose Mr. Indrasil—?”

Chips and Sally looked at each other strangely, and both just about broke their backs getting up. “Got to see those weights and counter weights get stored right,” Sally said, and Chips muttered something not too convincing about checking on the rear axle of his U-Haul.

And that’s about the way any conversation concerning Mr. Indrasil or Mr. Legere usually broke up—hurriedly, with many hard-forced excuses.

We said farewell to Illinois and comfort at the same time. A killing hot spell came on, seemingly at the very instant we crossed the border, and it stayed with us for the next month and a half, as we moved slowly across Missouri and into Kansas. Everyone grew short of temper, including the animals. And that, of course, included the cats, which were Mr. Indrasil’s responsibility. He rode the roustabouts unmercifully, and myself in particular. I grinned and tried to bear it, even though I had my own case of prickly heat. You just don’t argue with a crazy man, and I’d pretty well decided that was what Mr. Indrasil was.

No one was getting any sleep, and that is the curse of all circus performers. Loss of sleep slows up reflexes, and slow reflexes make for danger. In Independence Sally O’Hara fell seventy-five feet into the nylon netting and fractured her shoulder. Andrea Solienni, our bareback rider, fell off one of her horses during rehearsal and was knocked unconscious by a flying hoof. Chips Baily suffered silently with the fever that was always with him, his face a waxen mask, with cold perspiration clustered at each temple.

And in many ways, Mr. Indrasil had the roughest row to hoe of all. The cats were nervous and short-tempered, and every time he stepped into the Demon Cat Cage, as it was billed, he took his life in his hands. He was feeding the lions inordinate amounts of raw meat right before he went on, something that lion tamers rarely do, contrary to popular belief. His face grew drawn and haggard, and his eyes were wild.

Mr. Legere was almost always there, by Green Terror’s cage, watching him. And that, of course, added to Mr. Indrasil’s load. The circus began eyeing the silk-shirted figure nervously as he passed, and I knew they were all thinking the same thing I was: He’s going to crack wide open, and when he does—

When he did, God alone knew what would happen.

The hot spell went on, and temperatures were climbing well into the nineties every day. It seemed as if the rain gods were mocking us. Every town we left would receive the showers of blessing. Every town we entered was hot, parched, sizzling.

And one night, on the road between Kansas City and Green Bluff, I saw something that upset me more than anything else.

It was hot—abominably hot. It was no good even trying to sleep. I rolled about on my cot like a man in a fever-delirium, chasing the sandman but never quite catching him. Finally I got up, pulled on my pants, and went outside.

We had pulled off into a small field and drawn into a circle. Myself and two other roustabouts had unloaded the cats so they could catch whatever breeze there might be. The cages were there now, painted dull silver by the swollen Kansas moon, and a tall figure in white whipcord breeches was standing by the biggest of them. Mr. Indrasil.

He was baiting Green Terror with a long, pointed pike. The big cat was padding silently around the cage, trying to avoid the sharp tip. And the frightening thing was, when the staff did punch into the tiger’s flesh, it did not roar in pain and anger as it should have. It maintained an ominous silence, more terrifying to the person who knows cats than the loudest of roars.

It had gotten to Mr. Indrasil, too. “Quiet bastard, aren’t you?” He grunted. Powerful arms flexed, and the iron shaft slid forward. Green Terror flinched, and his eyes rolled horribly. But he did not make a sound. “Yowl!” Mr. Indrasil hissed. “Go ahead and yowl, you monster, Yowl!” And he drove his spear deep into the tiger’s flank.

Then I saw something odd. It seemed that a shadow moved in the darkness under one of the far wagons, and the moonlight seemed to glint on staring eyes—green eyes.

A cool wind passed silently through the clearing, lifting dust and rumpling my hair.

Mr. Indrasil looked up, and there was a queer listening expression on his face. Suddenly he dropped the bar, turned, and strode back to his trailer.

I stared again at the far wagon, but the shadow was gone. Green Tiger stood motionlessly at the bars of his cage, staring at Mr. Indrasil’s trailer. And the thought came to me that it hated Mr. Indrasil not because he was cruel or vicious, for the tiger respects these qualities in its own animalistic way, but rather because he was a deviate from even the tiger’s savage norm. He was a rogue. That’s the only way I can put it. Mr. Indrasil was not only a human tiger, but a rogue tiger as well.

The thought jelled inside me, disquieting and a little scary. I went back inside, but still I could not sleep.

The heat went on.

Every day we fried, every night we tossed and turned, sweating and sleepless. Everyone was painted red with sunburn, and there were fistfights over trifling affairs. Everyone was reaching the point of explosion.

Mr. Legere remained with us, a silent watcher, emotionless on the surface, but, I sensed, with deep-running currents of—what? Hate? Fear? Vengeance? I could not place it. But he was potentially dangerous, I was sure of that. Perhaps more so than Mr. Indrasil was, if anyone ever lit his particular fuse.

He was at the circus at every performance, always dressed in his nattily creased brown suit, despite the killing temperatures. He stood silently by Green Terror’s cage, seeming to commune deeply with the tiger, who was always quiet when he was around.

From Kansas to Oklahoma, with no letup in the temperature. A day without a heat prostration case was a rare day indeed. Crowds were beginning to drop off; who wanted to sit under a stifling canvas tent when there was an air-conditioned movie just around the block?

We were all as jumpy as cats, to coin a particularly applicable phrase. And as we set down stakes in Wildwood Green, Oklahoma, I think we all knew a climax of some sort was close at hand. And most of us knew it would involve Mr. Indrasil. A bizarre occurrence had taken place just prior to our first Wildwood performance. Mr. Indrasil had been in the Demon Cat Cage, putting the ill-tempered lions through their paces. One of them missed its balance on its pedestal, tottered and almost regained it. Then, at that precise moment, Green Terror let out a terrible, ear-splitting roar.

The lion fell, landed heavily, and suddenly launched itself with rifle-bullet accuracy at Mr. Indrasil. With a frightened curse, he heaved his chair at the cat’s feet, tangling up the driving legs. He darted out just as the lion smashed against the bars.

As he shakily collected himself preparatory to re-entering the cage, Green Terror let out another roar—but this one monstrously like a huge, disdainful chuckle.

Mr. Indrasil stared at the beast, white-faced, then turned and walked away. He did not come out of his trailer all afternoon.

That afternoon wore on interminably. But as the temperature climbed, we all began looking hopefully toward the west, where huge banks of thunderclouds were forming.

“Rain, maybe,” I told Chips, stopping by his barking platform in front of the sideshow.

But he didn’t respond to my hopeful grin. “Don’t like it,” he said. “No wind. Too hot. Hail or tornadoes.” His face grew grim. “It ain’t no picnic, ridin’ out a tornado with a pack of crazy-wild animals all over the place, Eddie. I’ve thanked God mor’n once when we’ve gone through the tornado belt that we don’t have no elephants.

“Yeah,” he added gloomily, “you better hope them clouds stay right on the horizon.”

But they didn’t. They moved slowly toward us, cyclopean pillars in the sky, purple at the bases and awesome blue-black through the cumulonimbus. All air movement ceased, and the heat lay on us like a woolen winding-shroud. Every now and again, thunder would clear its throat further west.

About four, Mr. Farnum himself, ringmaster and half-owner of the circus, appeared and told us there would be no evening performance; just batten down and find a convenient hole to crawl into in case of trouble. There had been corkscrew funnels spotted in several places between Wildwood and Oklahoma City, some within forty miles of us.

There was only a small crowd when the announcement came, apathetically wandering through the sideshow exhibits or ogling the animals. But Mr. Legere had not been present all day; the only person at Green Terror’s cage was a sweaty high-school boy with clutch of books. When Mr. Farnum announced the U.S. Weather Bureau tornado warning that had been issued, he hurried quickly away.

I and the other two roustabouts spent the rest of the afternoon working our tails off, securing tents, loading animals back into their wagons, and making generally sure that everything was nailed down.

Finally only the cat cages were left, and there was a special arrangement for those. Each cage had a special mesh “breezeway” accordioned up against it, which, when extended completely, connected with the Demon Cat Cage. When the smaller cages had to be moved, the felines could be herded into the big cage while they were loaded up. The big cage itself rolled on gigantic casters and could be muscled around to a position where each cat could be let back into its original cage. It sounds complicated, and it was, but it was just the only way.

We did the lions first, then Ebony Velvet, the docile black panther that had set the circus back almost one season’s receipts. It was a tricky business coaxing them up and then back through the breezeways, but all of us preferred it to calling Mr. Indrasil to help.

By the time we were ready for Green Terror, twilight had come—a queer, yellow twilight that hung humidly around us. The sky above had taken on a flat, shiny aspect that I had never seen and which I didn’t like in the least.

“Better hurry,” Mr. Farnum said, as we laboriously trundled the Demon Cat Cage back to where we could hook it to the back of Green Terror’s show cage. “Barometer’s falling off fast.” He shook his head worriedly. “Looks bad, boys. Bad.” He hurried on, still shaking his head.

We got Green Terror’s breezeway hooked up and opened the back of his cage. “In you go,” I said encouragingly.

Green Terror looked at me menacingly and didn’t move.

Thunder rumbled again, louder, closer, sharper. The sky had gone jaundice, the ugliest color I have ever seen. Wind-devils began to pick jerkily at our clothes and whirl away the flattened candy wrappers and cotton-candy cones that littered the area.

“Come on, come on,” I urged and poked him easily with the blunt-tipped rods we were given to herd them with.

Green Terror roared ear-splittingly, and one paw lashed out with blinding speed. The hardwood pole was jerked from my hands and splintered as if it had been a greenwood twig. The tiger was on his feet now, and there was murder in his eyes.

“Look,” I said shakily. “One of you will have to go get Mr. Indrasil, that’s all. We can’t wait around.”

As if to punctuate my words, thunder cracked louder, the clapping of mammoth hands.

Kelly Nixon and Mike McGregor flipped for it; I was excluded because of my previous run-in with Mr. Indrasil. Kelly drew the task, threw us a wordless glance that said he would prefer facing the storm and then started off.

He was gone almost ten minutes. The wind was picking up velocity now, and twilight was darkening into a weird six o’clock night. I was scared, and am not afraid to admit it. That rushing, featureless sky, the deserted circus grounds, the sharp, tugging wind-vortices, all that makes a memory that will stay with me always, undimmed.

And Green Terror would not budge into his breezeway.

Kelly Nixon came rushing back, his eyes wide. “I pounded on his door for ’most five minutes!” He gasped. “Couldn’t raise him!”

We looked at each other, at a loss. Green Terror was a big investment for the circus. He couldn’t just be left in the open. I turned bewilderedly, looking for Chips, Mr. Farnum, or anybody who could tell me what to do. But everyone was gone. The tiger was our responsibility. I considered trying to load the cage bodily into the trailer, but I wasn’t going to get my fingers in that cage.

“Well, we’ve just got to go and get him,” I said. “The three of us. Come on.” And we ran toward Mr. Indrasil’s trailer through the gloom of coming night.

We pounded on his door until he must have thought all the demons of hell were after him. Thankfully, it finally jerked open. Mr. Indrasil swayed and stared down at us, his mad eyes rimmed and oversheened with drink. He smelled like a distillery.

“Damn you, leave me alone,” he snarled.

“Mr. Indrasil—” I had to shout over the rising whine of the wind. It was like no storm I had ever heard of or read about, out there. It was like the end of the world.

“You,” he gritted softly. He reached down and gathered my shirt up in a knot. “I’m going to teach you a lesson you’ll never forget.” He glared at Kelly and Mike, cowering back in the moving storm shadows. “Get out!”

They ran. I didn’t blame them; I’ve told you—Mr. Indrasil was crazy. And not just ordinary crazy—he was like a crazy animal, like one of his own cats gone bad.

“All right,” he muttered, staring down at me, his eyes like hurricane lamps. “No juju to protect you now. No grisgris.” His lips twitched in a wild, horrible smile. “He isn’t here now, is he? We’re two of a kind, him and me. Maybe the only two left. My nemesis—and I’m his.” He was rambling, and I didn’t try to stop him. At least his mind was off me.

“Turned that cat against me, back in ’58. Always had the power more’n me. Fool could make a million—the two of us could make a million if he wasn’t so damned high and mighty… what’s that?”

It was Green Terror, and he had begun to roar ear-splittingly.

“Haven’t you got that damned tiger in?” He screamed, almost falsetto. He shook me like a rag doll.

“He won’t go!” I found myself yelling back. “You’ve got to—”

But he flung me away. I stumbled over the fold-up steps in front of his trailer and crashed into a bone-shaking heap at the bottom. With something between a sob and a curse, Mr. Indrasil strode past me, face mottled with anger and fear.

I got up, drawn after him as if hypnotized. Some intuitive part of me realized I was about to see the last act played out.

Once clear of the shelter of Mr. Indrasil’s trailer, the power of the wind was appalling. It screamed like a runaway freight train. I was an ant, a speck, an unprotected molecule before that thundering, cosmic force.

And Mr. Legere was standing by Green Terror’s cage.

It was like a tableau from Dante. The near-empty cage-clearing inside the circle of trailers; the two men, facing each other silently, their clothes and hair rippled by the shrieking gale; the boiling sky above; the twisting wheatfields in the background, like damned souls bending to the whip of Lucifer.

“It’s time, Jason,” Mr. Legere said, his words flayed across the clearing by the wind.

Mr. Indrasil’s wildly whipping hair lifted around the livid scar across the back of his neck. His fists clenched, but he said nothing. I could almost feel him gathering his will, his life force, his id. It gathered around him like an unholy nimbus.

And, then, I saw with sudden horror that Mr. Legere was unhooking Green Terror’s breezeway—and the back of the cage was open!

I cried out, but the wind ripped my words away.

The great tiger leaped out and almost flowed past Mr. Legere. Mr. Indrasil swayed, but did not run. He bent his head and stared down at the tiger.

And Green Terror stopped.

He swung his huge head back to Mr. Legere, almost turned, and then slowly turned back to Mr. Indrasil again. There was a terrifyingly palpable sensation of directed force in the air, a mesh of conflicting wills centered around the tiger. And the wills were evenly matched.

I think, in the end, it was Green Terror’s own will—his hate of Mr. Indrasil—that tipped the scales.

The cat began to advance, his eyes hellish, flaring beacons. And something strange began to happen to Mr. Indrasil. He seemed to be folding in on himself, shriveling, accordioning. The silk-shirt lost shape, the dark, whipping hair became a hideous toadstool around his collar.

Mr. Legere called something across to him, and, simultaneously, Green Terror leaped.

I never saw the outcome. The next moment I was slammed flat on my back, and the breath seemed to be sucked from my body. I caught one crazily tilted glimpse of a huge, towering cyclone funnel, and then the darkness descended.

When I awoke, I was in my cot just aft of the grainery bins in the all-purpose storage trailer we carried. My body felt as if it had been beaten with padded Indian clubs.

Chips Baily appeared, his face lined and pale. He saw my eyes were open and grinned relievedly. “Didn’t know as you were ever gonna wake up. How you feel?”

“Dislocated,” I said. “What happened? How’d I get here?”

“We found you piled up against Mr. Indrasil’s trailer. The tornado almost carried you away for a souvenir, m’boy.”

At the mention of Mr. Indrasil, all the ghastly memories came flooding back. “Where is Mr. Indrasil? And Mr. Legere?”

His eyes went murky, and he started to make some kind of an evasive answer.

“Straight talk,” I said, struggling up on one elbow. “I have to know, Chips. I have to.”

Something in my face must have decided him. “Okay. But this isn’t exactly what we told the cops—in fact we hardly told the cops any of it. No sense havin’ people think we’re crazy. Anyhow, Indrasil’s gone. I didn’t even know that Legere guy was around.”

“And Green Tiger?”

Chips’ eyes were unreadable again. “He and the other tiger fought to death.”

“Other tiger? There’s no other—”

“Yeah, but they found two of ’em, lying in each other’s blood. Hell of a mess. Ripped each other’s throats out.”

“What—where—”

“Who knows? We just told the cops we had two tigers. Simpler that way.” And before I could say another word, he was gone.

And that’s the end of my story—except for two little items. The words Mr. Legere shouted just before the tornado hit: “When a man and an animal live in the same shell, Indrasil, the instincts determine the mold!”

The other thing is what keeps me awake nights. Chips told me later, offering it only for what it might be worth. What he told me was that the strange tiger had a long scar on the back of its neck.

Railroad watched Bobby Lee grab the grandmother’s body under the armpits and drag her up the other side of the ditch. “Whyn’t you help him, Hiram,” he said.

Hiram took off his coat, skidded down into the ditch after Bobby Lee, and got hold of the old lady’s legs. Together he and Bobby Lee lugged her across the field towards the woods. Her broken blue hat was still pinned to her head, which lolled against Bobby Lee’s shoulder. The woman’s face grinned lopsidedly all the way into the shadow of the trees.

Railroad carried the cat over to the Studebaker. It occurred to him that he didn’t know the cat’s name, and now that the entire family was dead he never would. It was a calico, gray striped with a broad white face and an orange nose. “What’s your name, puss-puss?” he whispered, scratching it behind the ears. The cat purred. One by one Railroad went round and rolled up the windows of the car. A fracture zigzagged across the windshield, and the front passenger’s vent window was shattered. He stuffed Hiram’s coat into the vent window hole. Then he put the cat inside the car and shut the door. The cat put its front paws up on the dashboard and, watching him, gave a pantomime meow.

Railroad pushed up his glasses and stared off toward the woodline where Bobby Lee and Hiram had taken the bodies. The place was hot and still, silence broken only by birdsong from somewhere up the embankment behind him. He squinted up into the cloudless sky. Only a couple of hours of sun left. He rubbed the spot on his shoulder where the grandmother had touched him. Somehow he had wrenched it when he jerked away from her.

The last thing the grandmother had said picked at him: “You’re one of my own children.” The old lady had looked familiar, but she didn’t look anything like his mother. But maybe his father had sown some wild oats in the old days—Railroad knew he had—could the old lady have been his mother, for real? It would explain why the woman who had raised him, the sweetest of women, could have been saddled with a son as bad as he was.

The idea caught in his head. He wished he’d had the sense to ask the grandmother a few questions. The old woman might have been sent to tell him the truth.

When Hiram and Bobby Lee came back, they found Railroad leaning under the hood of the car.

“What we do now, boss?” Bobby Lee asked.

“Police could be here any minute,” Hiram said. Blood was smeared on the leg of his khaki pants. “Somebody might of heard the shots.”

Railroad pulled himself out from under the hood. “Onliest thing we got to worry about now, Hiram, is how we get this radiator to stop leaking. You find a tire iron and straighten out this here fan. Bobby Lee, you get the belt off’n the other car.”

It took longer than the half hour Hiram had estimated to get the people’s Studebaker back on the road. By the time they did it was twilight, and the red-dirt road was cast in the shadows of the pinewoods. They pushed the stolen Hudson they’d been driving off into the trees and got into the Studebaker.

Railroad gripped the wheel of the car and they bounced down the dirt road toward the main highway. Hat pushed back on his head, Hiram went through the dead man’s wallet, while in the back seat Bobby Lee had the cat on his lap and was scratching it under the chin. “Kitty-kitty-kitty-kitty-kitty,” he murmured.

“Sixty-eight dollars,” Hiram said. “With the twenty-two from the wife’s purse, that makes ninety bucks.” He turned around and handed a wad of bills to Bobby Lee. “Get rid of that damn cat,” he said. “Want me to hold yours for you?” he asked Railroad.

Railroad reached over, took the bills, and stuffed them into the pocket of the yellow shirt with bright blue parrots, that had belonged to the husband who’d been driving the car. Bailey Boy, the grandmother had called him. Railroad’s shoulder twinged.

The car shuddered; the wheels had been knocked out of kilter when it rolled. If he tried pushing past fifty, it would shake itself right off the road. Railroad felt the warm weight of his pistol inside his belt, against his belly. Bobby Lee hummed tunelessly in the back seat. Hiram was quiet, fidgeting, looking out at the dark trees. He tugged his battered coat out of the vent window, tried to shake some of the wrinkles out of it. “You oughtn’t to use a man’s coat without saying to him,” he grumbled.

Bobby Lee spoke up. “He didn’t want the cat to get away.”

Hiram sneezed. “Will you throw that damn animal out the damn window?”

“She never hurt you none,” Bobby Lee said.

Railroad said nothing. He had always imagined that the world was slightly unreal, that he was meant to be the citizen of some other place. His mind was a box. Outside the box was that world of distraction, amusement, annoyance. Inside the box his real life went on, the struggle between what he knew and what he didn’t know. He had a way of acting—polite, detached—because that way he wouldn’t be bothered. When he was bothered, he got mad. When he got mad, bad things happened.

He had always been prey to remorse, but now he felt it more fully than he had since he was a boy. He hadn’t paid enough attention. He’d pegged the old lady as a hypocrite and had gone back into his box, thinking her just another fool from that puppet world. But that moment of her touching him—she’d wanted to comfort him. And he shot her.

What was it the old woman had said? “You could be honest if you’d only try… Think how wonderful it would be to settle down and live a comfortable life and not have to think about somebody chasing you all the time.”

He knew she was only saying that to save her life. But that didn’t mean it couldn’t also be a message.

Outside the box, Hiram asked, “What was all that yammer yammer with the grandmother about Jesus? We doing all the killing while you yammer yammer.”

“He did shoot the old lady,” Bobby Lee said.

“And made us carry her off to the woods, when if he’d of waited she could of walked there like the others. We’re the ones get blood on our clothes.”

Railroad said quietly, “You don’t like the way things are going, son?”

Hiram twitched against the seat like he was itchy between the shoulder blades. “I ain’t sayin’ that. I just want out of this state.”

“We going to Atlanta. In Atlanta we can get lost.”

“Gonna get me a girl!” Bobby Lee said.

“They got more cops in Atlanta than the rest of the state put together,” Hiram said. “In Florida…”

Without taking his eyes off the road, Railroad snapped his right hand across the bridge of Hiram’s nose. Hiram jerked, more startled than hurt, and his hat tumbled off into the back seat.

Bobby Lee laughed, and handed Hiram his hat.

Candia. It was surely in Candia, with its crumbling Venetian waterfront and its abandoned minarets, and its harbor sliding into the rose-coloured sea further by an inch every day. Just like Ben Wheeler when I first spotted him, with his bottle of raki at his permanent station outside the Black Orchid Café, a misted tumbler forever fixed at some point on the arc between tabletop and bottom lip.

I had just climbed down from the rusting, antiquated bus, the sole passenger to disembark in that dusty square, when I saw him, at a time when I never expected to see again anyone I’d ever known.

His glass of raki arrested itself on its mechanical ascent, and he peered across the rim of his tumbler directly into my eyes. He was sitting at a table on the concrete edge of the neglected wharf. Over his shoulder the sun was punctured on a derelict minaret, spilling lavender and molten gold across the motionless waters of the harbor. He took a sip from his glass, and turned away.

“Wheeler,” I called. “Hey, Wheeler!”

On hearing his name he spun round and looked at me again, this time with an expression of incredulity and horror. Then he looked around wildly, as if for egress. For a moment I thought he was actually going to make a break for it and run away from me. I crossed the square to the café and dragged a seat from under the table; but as he showed no sign that he would allow me to join him, I was made to hover.

“Don’t you remember me?” I asked.

Before I got an answer a singer struck up in the square. He had a cardboard shoe-box for donations and was singing in that curious, deep-throated and unaccompanied resitica of the dispossessed people from the mountains. The sound was of almost unendurable melancholy and sweetness, and the guttural voice resonated along the baked brickwork.

Wheeler put down his glass and hooked his thumbs in his waistband, regarding me with an unblinking gaze. I wasn’t fooled. He was clearly nervous. It was as if he had somewhere important to go, but in his astonishment at seeing me there, he couldn’t tear himself away.

“So what are you doing here?” I asked.

He eyed me steadily. “I might ask you the same question.”

He looked back at the square and stroked the white stubble of his beard. Again I got the impression I was detaining him from something important.

“I’ve come here to drink myself to death,” I joked. At least, it was a truth hidden inside a joke, but he nodded seriously, as if this was perfectly reasonable.

The arrival of a waiter brought a moment’s relief. Slow to spot him, Wheeler turned suddenly and fixed the waiter with his extraordinary gaze. The boy shuffled uncomfortably, tapping the steel disc of his tray against his thigh.

“Let me stand you a drink,” I suggested.

Wheeler put his hand to his mouth, removing something very small from the tip of his tongue. “Sure.” He let his eyes drop. “Sit down. I’ll have a beer. Yes, I’ll have a beer.”

I sat, but I was already beginning to regret this. Ben Wheeler looked terrible. I could see a ring of filth on the collar of his short-sleeved shirt. The hems of his oil-spotted chinos were rolled and his bare feet were thrust inside a pair of rotting, rope-soled espadrilles. When the beer arrived, he slurped it greedily. We sat in a stiff silence for a while, the swelling vocalizations of the resitica man the only other sound in the square in the parched heat of the afternoon.

It was a question of arriving at the right time. You didn’t necessarily, for example, turn up at the same time each evening, but juggled various considerations, such as the heat, the number of clouds in the sky, even what type they were, whether they were cumulus or stratus or cirro-stratus—stuff like that. You wanted to turn up just at the right moment, just in time to get a seat and a good view and not a moment too soon. After all, the terrace of the Africa House Hotel was not a place you wanted to spend any more time than you absolutely had to. It simply wasn’t that nice.

It wasn’t nice partly because you were surrounded by all those people you had gone to Zanzibar to get away from—white people, Europeans, tourists; mzungu, the locals called them, red bananas. White inside but red on the outside, as soon as they’d been in the sun for a couple of hours. Apparently there was a strain of red-skinned banana that grew on the island.

And partly because the place itself was grotsville. In colonial days, the Africa House Hotel was the English Club, but since the departure of the British in 1963, it had been pretty much allowed to go to seed.

But you didn’t go there for the moth-eaten hunting trophies on the walls, or the charmless service at the counter, but to sit as close to the front of the terrace as you could, order a beer and have it brought to you, and watch the sun sink into the Indian Ocean. Over there, just below the horizon—the continental land mass of Africa. Amazing really that you couldn’t see it, thought Craig. It didn’t really matter how far away it was—twenty miles, thirty—looking at it on the map, Zanzibar Island was no more than a tick clinging to the giant African elephant.

Craig ordered a Castle lager from the waiter who slunk oilily around the tables and their scattered chairs. He was a strange, tired-looking North African with one of those elastic snake-buckle belts doing the job of keeping his brown trousers up. Similar to the one Craig had worn at school—8,000 miles away in east London.

He didn’t like ordering a Castle, or being seen with one (they didn’t give you a glass at the Africa House Hotel). It was South African and everyone knew it was South African. He supposed it was all right now, but still, if people saw you drinking South African beer they’d assume you were drinking it because that’s what you drank back home. In South Africa. And whereas it was all right to buy South African goods, it still wasn’t all right to be South African.

And Craig wasn’t, and he didn’t want anyone to think he was, but not so badly that he’d drink any more of the Tanzanian Safari, or the Kenyan Tusker. One was too yeasty, the other so weak it was like drinking bat’s piss.

This was his third consecutive evening at the Africa House Hotel and he was by now prepared to let people think he was—or might be—South African. He wasn’t staying there, no way, uh-uh—he was staying at Mazson’s, a few minutes’ walk away. Air-con, satellite TV, a bath as well as a shower—and a business centre. The business centre was what had clinched it. Plus the fact the paper was paying.

Craig slipped the elastic band off his ponytail and shook out his fair hair, brushed it back to round up any strays, and reapplied the elastic. He took off his Oakley wraparound shades and pinched the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger. Stuck them back on. Squinted at the sun, still a few degrees above the bank of stratus clouds which would prevent the Africa House Hotel crowd from enjoying a proper sunset for the third evening in a row.

From behind his Oakleys, Craig checked out the terrace: people-watching, with a purpose for once. News of the disappearances clearly wasn’t putting these tourists off coming to Zanzibar. Mainly because there wasn’t any news. Not enough of a problem in any one country to create a crisis. One weeping family from Sutton Coldfield—“Sarah just wouldn’t go off with anyone, she’s not that kind of girl”; a red-eyed single mother from Strathclyde—“There’s been no word from Louise for three weeks now.” It wasn’t enough to get the tabloids interested and the broadsheets wouldn’t pick up on it until they were sure there was a real story. A big story. No news was no news and, by and large, didn’t make the news.

Craig had latched on to Sarah’s story following an impassioned letter to the editor of his paper from the missing girl’s mother. He was a soft touch, he told his commissioning editor: couldn’t bear to think of those good people sitting on the edge of their floral-pattern IKEA sofa, waiting for the phone to ring, weeping—especially not in Sutton Coldfield. But MacNeill, who’d been commissioning pieces from Craig for three years, knew the young man only attached himself to a story if there was a story there. And since he was between desk assignments anyway, MacNeill let him go. On the quiet, like. Neither the Tanzanian government nor the Zanzibari police would acknowledge the problem—too damaging to the developing tourism industry, ironically—so Craig needed a cover, which Craig’s sister, the wildlife photographer, came up with.

The Zanzibar leopard, smaller than the mainland species, was rumoured by some to be extinct and by others to be around still, though in very small numbers. One of the guide books reckoned if there were any on the islands, they had been domesticated by practitioners of herbal medicine—witch doctors to you and me. The Zanzibari driver who collected Craig from the airport laughed indulgently at the idea. And Craig read later in another guide book that witchcraft was believed to be widely practised on Pemba Island, 85 kilometres to the north of Zanzibar though part of the same territory. Though if you tried to speak to the locals about it, they became embarrassed or politely changed the subject. But that was Pemba, and the disappearances—37 to date, according to Craig’s researches—were quite specifically from Zanzibar Island.

Thirty-seven. Twenty-three women between 17 and 30, and 14 men, some of them older, mid-forties. From Denmark, Germany, Austria, Britain, France, Italy, Australia and the US. Enough of a problem as far as Craig was concerned. He was torn now, he was ashamed to admit, between wanting the world to wake up and make a concerted effort (thereby, hopefully, securing the earlier recovery of Sarah, or Sarah’s body, and 36 others) and hoping he would be the first to break the story.

The cover. A naturalist based at the University of Sussex, Craig’s brief was to confirm whether or not leopards still lived wild on the island. They’d even put Sussex’s professor of zoology in the picture, for a consideration of course which they called a consultancy fee, so that if anyone called from Zanzibar to check up on Craig, they’d find him to be bona fide.

That afternoon, Craig had visited the Natural History Museum, quite the bizarrest of its type in his experience. Glass cases full of birds, presumably stuffed birds, but not mounted—lying down, recently-dead-looking, their little feet tied together with string. Tags to identify them. Their eyes dabs of chalk. In a grimy case all on its own, the bones of a dodo wired up into a standing position. A couple of stuffed bats—the American Fruit Bat and the Pemba Fruit Bat—ten times the size of the swallow-like creatures that had flitted about his head as he’d walked off his dinner the evening before. A crate with its lid ajar: when he opened it, a flurry of flies, one he couldn’t prevent going up his nose. Inside, a board with three rats fixed to it—dead again, stuffed presumably, but with legs trussed at tiny rodent ankles. No effort made to have them assume lifelike poses. No bits of twig and leaf. No glass eyes. No glass case. He dropped the crate lid.

Oddest of all: row upon row of glass jars containing dead sea creatures and deformed animal foetuses, the glass furred up with dust and calcified deposits, so you had to bend down and squint to make out the bloodless remains of a stonefish, the huge crab with the image on its shell of two camels with their masters. The conjoined duiker antelopes.

And the stuffed leopard. They hadn’t done a great job on it. The taxidermist’s task being to stage a magic show for eternity: the illusion of life in the cock of the head, the setting of a glassy twinkle. The Natural History Museum of Zanzibar should have been asking for their money back on this one. You could still see it was a leopard though. If you didn’t know, you’d look at it and you’d say leopard. Craig examined it from every angle. This was what he was here to find. Ostensibly. It couldn’t do any harm to have a good idea what one looked like.

Up on the terrace, the touts were working the crowd—slowly, carefully, with a lower-key approach than they tended to use down in Stone Town. In Stone Town the same guys would shadow you on the same streets day after day.

“Jambo,” they’d say.

“Jambo,” you’d reply, because it would be rude not to.

“You want to go to Prison Island? You want to go to the East Coast today? Maybe you want go to Nungwi? You want taxi?”

You ran the gauntlet going up Kenyatta Street and never had a moment’s peace when you were around Jamyatti Gardens, from where the boats left for Prison Island, its coral reefs and giant tortoises. He’d read the books all right.

“Jambo.” The voice was close to him. Craig sneaked a look around as he necked his beer. A young Zanzibari had moved in on a blonde English girl who had been sitting alone. The girl smiled a little shyly and the youth sat down next to her. “The sun is setting,” he said and the girl looked out over the ocean. The sun had started to dip behind the bank of cloud. “You want to go to Prison Island tomorrow?” he asked, pulling a pack of cigarettes from his pocket.

The girl shook her head. “No. Thanks.” She was still smiling but Craig could see she was a little nervous. Doing battle with her shyness was the adventurous spirit that had brought her this far from whichever northern market town she’d left behind. She was flattered by the youth’s attentions but could never quite forget the many warnings her worried parents would have given her in the weeks before she left.

The tout went through the list and still she politely declined. In the end he changed tack and offered to buy her a drink. Craig heard her say she’d have a beer. The youth caught the waiter’s eye and spoke to him fast in Swahili. Next time the waiter came by he had a can of Stella for the girl and a Coke for the tout. Craig watched as the girl popped open the Stella and almost imperceptibly shifted on her seat so that her upper body was angled slightly further away from the boy in favour of the ocean. Maybe she shouldn’t have accepted the beer, thought Craig. Or maybe it was old-fashioned to think like that. Perhaps these days girls had the right to accept the beer and turn the other way. He just wasn’t sure the African youth would see it like that. Whether he was a practising Muslim—the abnegation of alcohol told him that—or not.

A high-pitched whine in Craig’s ear. A pin-prick in the forearm. He smacked his hand down hard, lifted it slowly to peer underneath.

Craig started, then shuddered; never able to stand the sight of blood, whether his own or anybody else’s, he had once run out of the cinema during an afternoon screening of The Shining. He had fainted at the scene of a road accident, having caught sight of a pedestrian victim’s leg, her stocking sodden with her own blood. She survived unscathed; Craig’s temple bore a scar to this day where he had hit his head on the pavement.

The mosquito had drunk well, and not just of Craig either. His stomach turning over, he quickly inspected the creature’s dinner which was smeared across his arm, a red blotch in the shape of Madagascar, almost an inch long. Craig wondered whose blood it was, given that the mozzie had barely had enough time to sink its needle beneath his skin. Some other drinker’s? Craig looked about. Not that of the Italian in the tight briefs, he hoped. Nor ideally had it come from either of the two South African rugby players sitting splayed-legged at the front by the railing.

He spat on to a paper tissue and wiped his arm vigorously without giving it another look until he was sure it had to be clear. The energy from the slap had been used up bursting the balloon of blood; the mosquito’s empty body, split but relatively intact, was stuck to Craig’s arm like an empty popsicle wrapper.

This bothered him less than the minutest trace of blood still inside the dead insect’s glassy skin.

When he looked up, the blonde girl had joined a group of Europeans—Scandinavians or Germans by the look of them—and was eagerly working her way into their telling of travellers’ tales, while the young tout glared angrily at the bank of clouds obscuring the sun, his left leg vibrating like a wire. Craig hoped he wasn’t angry enough to get nasty. Doubted it—after all, chances were this sort of thing happened a lot up here. The kid couldn’t expect a hundred percent strike rate.

Craig gave it five minutes, then went over and sat next to the kid. Kid turned around and Craig started talking.

FROM: John J. Finnegan, President

Wake & Finnegan

Marketing Division

TO: David Brooks, Head Copywriter, Creative Projects Department

Okay, son. Where is it? Life Pro Labs is getting a little antsy. They’re laying out more cash for this campaign than you know. Show me something rough.

“There was, of course,” Sir Jeffrey said, “the Inconstancy Plague in Cheshire. Short-lived, but a phenomenon I don’t think we can quite discount.”

It was quite late at the Travellers’ Club, and Sir Jeffrey and I had been discussing (as we seemed often to do in those years of the Empire’s greatest, yet somehow most tenuous, extent) some anomalous irruptions of the foreign and the odd into the home island’s quiet life—small, unlooked-for effects which those centuries of adventure and acquisition had had on an essentially stay-at-home race. At least that was my thought. I was quite young.

“It’s no good your saying ‘of course’ in that offhand tone,” I said, attempting to catch the eye of Barnett, whom I felt as much as saw passing through the crepuscular haze of the smoking room. “I’ve no idea what the Inconstancy Plague was.”

From within his evening dress Sir Jeffrey drew out a cigar case, which faintly resembled a row of cigars, as a mummy case resembles the human form within. He offered me one, and we lit them without haste; Sir Jeffrey started a small vortex in his brandy glass. I understood that these rituals were introductory—that, in other words, I would have my tale.

“It was in the latter eighties,” Sir Jeffrey said. “I’ve no idea now how I first came to hear of it, though I shouldn’t be surprised if it was some flippant note in Punch. I paid no attention at first; the ‘popular delusions and madness of crowds’ sort of thing. I’d returned not long before from Ceylon, and was utterly, blankly oppressed by the weather. It was just starting autumn when I came ashore, and I spent the next four months more or less behind closed doors. The rain! The fog! How could I have forgotten? And the oddest thing was that no one else seemed to pay the slightest attention. My man used to draw the drapes every morning and say in the most cheerful voice, ‘Another dismal wet one, eh, sir?’ and I would positively turn my face to the wall.”

He seemed to sense that he had been diverted by personal memories, and drew on his cigar as though it were the font of recall.

“What brought it to notice was a seemingly ordinary murder case. A farmer’s wife in Winsford, married some decades, came one night into the Sheaf of Wheat, a public house, where her husband was lingering over a pint. From under her skirts she drew an old fowling-piece. She made a remark which was later reported quite variously by the onlookers, and gave him both barrels. One misfired, but the other was quite sufficient. We learn that the husband, on seeing this about to happen, seemed to show neither surprise nor anguish, merely looking up and—well, awaiting his fate.

“At the inquest, the witnesses reported the murderess to have said, before she fired, ‘I’m doing this in the name of all the others.’ Or perhaps it was ‘I’m doing this, Sam (his name), to save the others.’ Or possibly, ‘I’ve got to do this, Sam, to save you from that other.’ The woman seemed to have gone quite mad. She gave the investigators an elaborate and scarifying story which they, unfortunately, didn’t take down, being able to make no sense of it. The rational gist of it was that she had shot her husband for flagrant infidelities which she could bear no longer. When the magistrate asked witnesses if they knew of such infidelities—these things, in a small community, being notoriously difficult to hide—the men, as a body, claimed that they did not. After the trial, however, the women had dark and unspecific hints to make, how they could say much if they would, and so on. The murderess was adjudged unfit to stand trial, and hanged herself in Bedlam not long after.

“I don’t know how familiar you are with that oppressive part of the world. In those years farming was a difficult enterprise at best, isolating, stultifyingly boring, unremunerative. Hired men were heavy drinkers. Prices were depressed. The women aged quickly, what with continual childbirth added to a load of work at least equal to their menfolk’s. What I’m getting at is that it is, or was, a society the least of any conducive to adultery, amours, romance. And yet for some reason it appeared, after this murder pointed it up, so to speak, dramatically, that there was a veritable plague of inconstant husbands in northern Cheshire.”

“It’s difficult to imagine,” I said, “what evidence there could be of such a thing.”

“I had occasion to go to the county that autumn, just at the height of it all,” Sir Jeffrey went on, caressing an ashtray with the tip of his cigar. “I’d at last got a grip on myself and begun to accept invitations again. A fellow I’d known in Alexandria, a commercial agent who’d done spectacularly well for himself, asked me up for the shooting.”

“Odd place to go shooting.”

“Odd fellow. Arriviste, to speak frankly. The hospitality was lavish; the house was a red-brick Cheshire faux-Gothic affair, if you know what I mean, and the impression it gave of desolation and melancholy was remarkable. And there was no shooting; poured rain all weekend. One sat about leafing through novels or playing Cairo whist—which is what we called bridge in those days—and staring out the windows. One evening, at a loss for entertainment, our host—Watt was his name, and…”

“What was his name?” I asked.

“Exactly. He’d become a student of mesmerism, or hypnotism as he preferred to call it, and suggested we might have a bit of fun probing our dark underminds. We all declined, but Watt was insistent, and at last suborned a hearty local type, old squirearchical family, and—this is important—an inveterate, dirt-under-the-nails farmer. His conversation revolved, chiefly, around turnips.”

“Even his dark undermind’s?”

“Ah. Here we come to it. This gentleman’s wife was present at the gathering as well, and one couldn’t help noticing the hangdog air he maintained around her, the shifty eyes, the nervous start he gave when she spoke to him from behind; and also a certain dreaminess, an abstraction, that would fall on him at odd moments.”

“Worrying about his turnips, perhaps.”

Sir Jeffrey quashed his cigar, rather reproachfully, as though it were my own flippancy. “The point is that this ruddy-faced, absolutely ordinary fellow was cheating on his wife. One read it as though it were written on his shirt front. His wife seemed quite as aware of it as any; her face was drawn tight as her reticule. She blanched when he agreed to go under, and tried to lead him away, but Watt insisted he be a sport, and at last she retired with a headache. I don’t know what the man was thinking of when he agreed; had a bit too much brandy, I expect. At any rate, the lamps were lowered and the usual apparatus got out, the spinning disc and so on. The squire, to Watt’s surprise, went under as though slain. We thought at first he had merely succumbed to the grape, but then Watt began to question him, and he to answer, languidly but clearly, name, age, and so on. I’ve no doubt Watt intended to have the man stand on his head, or turn his waistcoat back-to-front, or that sort of thing, but before any of that could begin, the man began to speak. To address someone. Someone female. Most extraordinary, the way he was transformed.”

Sir Jeffrey, in the proper mood, shows a talent for mimicry, and now he seemed to transform himself into the hypnotized squire. His eyes glazed and half-closed, his mouth went slack (though his moustache remained upright) and one hand was raised as though to ward off an importunate spirit.

“‘No,’ says he. ‘Leave me alone. Close those eyes—those eyes. Why? Why? Dress yourself, oh God…’ And here he seemed quite in torment. Watt should of course have awakened the poor fellow immediately, but he was fascinated, as I confess we all were.

“‘Who is it you speak to?’ Watt asked.

“‘She,’ says the squire. ‘The foreign woman. The clawed woman. The cat.’

“‘What is her name?’

“‘Bastet.’

“‘How did she come here?’

“At this question the squire seemed to pause. Then he gave three answers: ‘Through the earth. By default. On the John Deering.’ This last answer astonished Watt, since, as he told me later, the John Deering was a cargo ship we had often dealt with, which made a regular Alexandria—Liverpool run.

“‘Where do you see her?’ Watt asked.

“‘In the sheaves of wheat.’”

“He meant the pub, I suppose,” I put in.

“I think not,” Sir Jeffrey said darkly. “He went on about the sheaves of wheat. He grew more animated, though it was more difficult to understand his words. He began to make sounds—well, how shall I put it? His breathing became stertorous, his movements…”

“I think I see.”

“Well, you can’t, quite. Because it was one of the more remarkable things I have ever witnessed. The man was making physical love to someone he described as a cat, or a sheaf of wheat.”

“The name he spoke,” I said, “is an Egyptian one. A goddess associated with the cat.”

“Precisely. It was midway through this ritual that Watt at last found himself, and gave an awakening command. The fellow seemed dazed, and was quite drenched with sweat; his hand shook when he took out his pocket-handkerchief to mop his face. He looked at once guilty and pleased, like—like—”

“The cat who ate the canary.”

“You have a talent for simile. He looked around at the company, and asked shyly if he had embarrassed himself. I tell you, old boy, we were hard-pressed to reassure him.”

Unsummoned, Barnett materialized beside us with the air of one about to speak tragic and ineluctable prophecies. It is his usual face. He said only that it had begun to rain. I asked for a whisky and soda. Sir Jeffrey seemed lost in thought during these transactions, and when he spoke again it was to muse: “Odd, isn’t it,” he said, “how naturally one thinks of cats as female, though we know quite well that they are distributed between two sexes. As far as I know, it is the same the world over. Whenever, for instance, a cat in a tale is transformed into a human, it is invariably a woman.”

“The eyes,” I said. “The movements—that certain sinuosity.”

“The air of independence,” Sir Jeffrey said. “False, of course. One’s cat is quite dependent on one, though he seems not to think so.”

“The capacity for ease.”

“And spite.”

“To return to our plague,” I said, “I don’t see how a single madwoman and a hypnotized squire amount to one.”

“Oh, that was by no means the end of it. Throughout that autumn there was, relatively speaking, a flurry of divorce actions and breach-of-promise suits. A suicide left a note: ‘I can’t have her, and I can’t live without her.’ More than one farmer’s wife, after years of dedication and many offspring, packed herself off to aged parents in Chester. And so on.

“Monday morning after the squire’s humiliation I returned to town. As it happened, Monday was market day in the village and I was able to observe at first hand some effects of the plague. I saw husbands and wives sitting at far ends of wagon seats, unable to meet each other’s eyes. Sudden arguments flaring without reason over the vegetables. I saw tears. I saw over and over the same hangdog, evasive, guilty look I described in our squire.”

“Hardly conclusive.”

“There is one further piece of evidence. The Roman Church has never quite eased its grip in that part of the world. It seems that about this time a number of R.C. wives clubbed together and sent a petition to their bishop, saying that the region was in need of an exorcism. Specifically, that their husbands were being tormented by a succubus. Or succubi—whether it was one or many was impossible to tell.”

“I shouldn’t wonder.”

“What specially intrigued me,” Sir Jeffrey went on, removing his eyeglass from between cheek and brow and polishing it absently, “is that in all this inconstancy only the men seemed to be accused; the women seemed solely aggrieved, rather than guilty, parties. Now if we take the squire’s words as evidence, and not merely ‘the stuff that dreams are made on,’ we have the picture of a foreign, apparently Egyptian, woman—or possibly women—embarking at Liverpool and moving unnoticed amid Cheshire, seeking whom she may devour and seducing yeomen in their barns amid the fruits of the harvest. The notion was so striking that I got in touch with a chap at Lloyd’s, and asked him about passenger lists for the John Deering over the last few years.”

“And?”

“There were none. The ship had been in dry dock for two or three years previous. It had made one run, that spring, and then been moth-balled. On that one run there were no passengers. The cargo from Alex consisted of the usual oil, dates, sago, rice, tobacco—and something called ‘antiquities.’ Since the nature of these was unspecified, the matter ended there. The Inconstancy Plague was short-lived; a letter from Watt the next spring made no mention of it, though he’d been avid for details—most of what I know comes from him and his gleanings of the Winsford Trumpet, or whatever it calls itself. I might never have come to any conclusion at all about the matter had it not been for a chance encounter in Cairo a year or so later.

“I was en route to the Sudan in the wake of the Khartoum disaster and was bracing myself, so to speak, in the bar of Shepheard’s. I struck up a conversation with an archaeologist fellow just off a dig around Memphis, and the talk turned, naturally, to Egyptian mysteries. The thing that continually astonished him, he said, was the absolute thoroughness of the ancient Egyptian mind. Once having decided a thing was ritualistically necessary, they admitted of no deviation in carrying it out.

“He instanced cats. We know in what high esteem the Egyptians held cats. If held in high esteem, they must be mummified after death; and so they were. All of them, or nearly all. Carried to their tombs with the bereaved family weeping behind, put away with favorite toys and food for the afterlife journey. Not long ago, he said, some three hundred thousand mummified cats were uncovered at Beni Hassan. An entire cat necropolis, unviolated for centuries.

“And then he told me something which gave me pause. More than pause. He said that, once uncovered, all those cats were disinterred and shipped to England. Every last one.”

“Good Lord. Why?”

“I have no idea. They were not, after all, the Elgin Marbles. This seemed to have been the response when they arrived at Liverpool, because not a single museum or collector of antiquities displayed the slightest interest. The whole lot had to be sold off to pay a rather large shipping bill.”

“Sold off? To whom, in God’s name?”

“To a Cheshire agricultural firm. Who proceeded to chop up the lot and resell it. To the local farmers, my dear boy. To use as fertilizer.”

Sir Jeffrey stared deeply into his nearly untouched brandy, watching the legs it made on the side of the glass, as though he read secrets there. “Now the scientific mind may be able to believe,” he said at last, “that three hundred thousand cats, aeons old, wrapped lovingly in winding cloths and put to rest with spices and with spells, may be exhumed from a distant land—and from a distant past as well—and minced into the loam of Cheshire, and it will all have no result but grain. I am not certain. Not certain at all.”

The smoking room of the Travellers’ Club was deserted now, except for the weary, unlaid ghost of Barnett. Above us on the wall the mounted heads of exotic animals were shadowed and nearly unnamable; one felt that they had just then thrust their coal-smoked and glass-eyed heads through the wall, seeking something, and that just the other side of the wall stood their vast and unimaginable bodies. Seeking what? The members, long dead as well, who had slain them and brought them to this?

“You’ve been in Egypt,” Sir Jeffrey said.

“Briefly.”

“I have always thought that Egyptian women were among the world’s most beautiful.”

“Certainly their eyes are stunning. With the veil, of course, one sees little else.”

“I spoke specifically of those circumstances when they are without the veil. In all senses.”

“Yes.”

“Depilated, many of them.” He spoke in a small, dreamy voice, as though he observed long-past scenes. “A thing I have always found—intriguing. To say the least.” He sighed deeply; he tugged down his waistcoat, preparatory to rising; he replaced his eyeglass. He was himself again. “Do you suppose,” he said, “that such a thing as a cab could be found at this hour? Well, let us see.”

“By the way,” I asked when we parted, “whatever came of the wives’ petition for an exorcism?”

“I believe the bishop sent it on to Rome for consideration. The Vatican, you know, does not move hastily on these things. For all I know, it may still be pending.”

Sing, oh, sing, of the sun-muscled Manticore! Thundering fleet are their scarlet feet, and great are their echoing roars! No hunter more patient than we, no serpent so sour-tailed as we, no snarling leaps lighter, no long teeth are brighter than ours—than ours!—on the scrub-spotted deserts of home!

Ha! Let us have none of that. Do not sing of us. We do not want your songs. We will sing, and you will listen.

The desert is wide and white and dry as an old bone. We worry it, we gnaw and tear and peel it bald. And we sing when the moon is jumping on the sand like a skinny white mouse, we sing and the saltbush weeps. The oases ripple under our breath, the blue and clear water where the rhinoceros wrangle, where the cheetah purrs and licks her paws, and the Upas trees waver green and violet in the scalding breeze!

They will tell you the Upas is a death-bower. They will call it the hydra-tree of the desert, and warn that if you sleep beneath it for even a night, you may wake, but to no morning man has known. They will say that three hundred soldiers all in bronze and feathers camped beneath an Upas once, to drink from the clear stream that flowed beneath its branches, and that by the time the sun touched their toes all were dead and cold as dinner. This is ridiculous, a fairy tale. But I suppose it is yet not entirely untrue, for the Upas is our mother, and we are enough of death for anyone. And if soldiers camp under an Upas when she is blowing her seed, it is no fault of the hungry kittens that tumble out if they find their supper plump and laid out on the sand.

Look, passersby—though not too closely!—at the radiant Upas, lover of the Sun in his golden bedchamber, her red branches thick and strong as a haunch, thorny and pitted, her green needles far too glossy and stiff to grow in the thirsty desert. Look at her fruit, nestled in the shadowy forks of her knotted trunk, how scarlet and purple, how thick and full of juice! Touch one at your peril, for these gleaming berries are not fruit but eggs, and it is we that grow within them, in the crimson sacs which wax in the blistering scrub-light, full of the peculiar Upas-yolk we drink and drink, which fills our tails with enough poison for a lifetime, until we rip that silk-thin skin and tumble out head first into the water, or soldiers, whichever seems most convenient.

I remember the Upas-milk. It was sweet, like blackberries and blood.

In the fruit-sac we know all things: how the Sun preened on the face of the oasis-pool, how one Upas, though neither the tallest or most beautiful thing in the desert, opened up her branches and grasped the reddening beams for her own. Her wood warmed and the pool rippled—the Sun would not have noticed if his mirror had not been marred. He would have been angry, and scorched the tree for her theft, had not the first Manticore-fruit burst open before him, and if he did not think the little cub with her needle-teeth and her whipping tail and her sky-bright eyes was the most lovely of all imaginable things, and immediately set about to teaching her to sting and roar and sing and kill, all the things he knew. The Upas smiled, and told her sisters how to follow her lead.

After we fall, it is harder to remember these things, to know they are true. But we do our best to love our parents and turn our prayers to the sky and the sand.

It is only unfortunate that we are more or less helpless when the Upas blows us free. No more fierce than little red kittens or infant snakes, blind and wet and mewling. Our tails do thrash quick and sharp in those first hours, indiscriminate, for we have not quite learned to control it when the oasis, littered with palm nuts and antelope-ribs, catches us in green-gold arms. This is when the wranglers come, if they are clever, with their silver tail-caps spangling in the desert light.

I would like to tell you I was reared in the open flats, the white and worried bone, that I tore open leopards and antelope and rhinoceros, that I remember what that tough gray flesh tasted like, and that horn. I would like to tell you that the Sun and I ran together, bounding red-pawed over the saltbush and the pale weeds, that in the warm red rocks I rolled with my legs in the air, scratching and roaring and eating as I pleased. I would like to tell you that the echoes there taught me to sing. I would like to tell you I was happy, and that the Sun was high in the sky.

But the wranglers came with a little silver cap, something like a thimble with buckles and straps, and armored in polished metals splashed with the last desperate strikes of countless kittens, lashed the thing to my barbed tail. My thrashings were dull thuds and sprays of sand, but nothing more. I howled—it is not only the province of wolves. I howled and that did startle them, for the voice of the Manticore is terrible and piercing and sweet, the sweetest and most terrible of all possible voices, like a flute and a trumpet playing together. It is barbed as surely as a tail. I howled and keened, thumping my useless limb against the ground pitifully. They took out wax stoppers and closed their ears to me, and into an amber cage I went, clapped in an amber collar, and gagged in leather to keep me silent.

Tell me again how the Gaselli sing. Tell me that no melodies are lovelier than theirs.

The heights of the amber city made me dizzy. The platforms spiral up and up those impossible cedars, and on the spindly bridges I nearly fainted away, so far below did the ground sway and wobble. They pulled me up with squeaking pulleys and moving flats drawn up with wet ropes. I retched into the muzzle and choked on my own bile. The green branches cut the clouds as I rose and crumbled against the lifting floor and sobbed against the straps which bit into my face until I tasted my own blood with every lurching inch upwards. I hitched and gagged, bewildered, as afraid as any lost beast. But I was close to the sky, so close, and the Sun beat my back fondly.

The amber cage had an amber lock, and there was a girl with an amber key. She kept it on the beads that slung around her like chains, dangling right at the base of her throat. In those days any number of creatures were brought from every hovel and height in the land to delight this creature, whose clear, calm eyes took in everything with equal regard and due. She was dutifully amazed at my fur and my tail, dutifully frightened at my muffled roar, dutifully patted my head and dutifully passed on to the next wonder of nature brought up the trees for her pleasure. She took no joy in any one animal over any other, and her voice was genteel and grateful when she thanked the wranglers for bringing her these miracles and grotesqueries. By the latter, she meant me, and thus I was given my name.

For some weeks she came, dutifully, to visit her menagerie, escorted by wranglers and noble nursemaids and occasionally her father. She played with the pygmy elephant and the wobble-kneed young Centaur whose legs were bound in her absence so that he would never grow to shame her with excess height. She had a Djinn whose smoke had gone out and a fish in a great glass bowl which owed her yet two wishes. Their games were odd and solemn—she sang to them and sat them to tea with amber cups they could not help but break, and scolded them for their manners. She forced their struggling heads onto her breast and all exclaimed it a miracle that her gentleness of spirit and purity of heart could charm the most savage of monsters.

She did not charm me.

After attempting to get me to drink from her dainty cups and sing with her while she did her sewing, she declared with great sadness that the beast she had named in jest was truly a grotesque beyond salvation, and that I should be sent away, for I was surely, in my unfathomable heart, unhappy there. I knew this meant the slaughterhouse or simply being shoved off of the platforms into the narrow spit of sea, but what maiden knows how the world is skewed to spare any testing of her virtue?

When she and her escort had gone, a small, dark shape remained, silhouetted against the doorframe of the wretched zoo. It came into the light, and I saw that it was a girl like the other one, and lost interest—save that she came and knelt by my cage, and, loosing a strand of black beads from her throat, put her own amber key into the lock, and opened the amber door.

“Poor Grotteschi. Do you see these beads? When amber is burned to make resin, this horrible black stuff is left over when the golden oil pours dutifully into the catch. No one wants it. It is garbage. I, too, am what is left over from her, what is thrown away when she has passed over it, what remains in the corners when she has swept by.”

She put her hands to the muzzle’s buckles and let it loose. By then I had grown, I was the size of a small horse, but the muzzle had never been changed. My jaw would never close quite right again. She did not mind my teeth. She rubbed my chin and my cheeks, wiped at the hardened blood with the hem of her dress. Her name was Hind. She was a good girl, and I slept in her bed from that night on.

Even when I was fully grown, she slept curled between my paws and demanded iron supports for her pitifully delicate bed. Together we snuck into the libraries at night, and she taught me to read from the books kept on the highest shelves, which I could reach for us, stories of lost girls and lost beasts and grotesques like us. She brought me cakes from the kitchens, covered in icing, so much thicker and richer than the mashed and rotten meat of her sister’s zoo. When she became more beautiful even than her sister, I used to sing at her window to the men who gathered there to play their flutes or harps. They scattered when faced with my superior songs, and I padded back to Hind and her black beads. I was happy. The Sun was high in the sky. Happiness, when you look back on it, seems so brief, but then, with her, my whole life seemed to pass by under the flitting cedar-shadows. Until the day she ran into our room and slammed the door behind her, her chest heaving under those black beads, her face flushed with tears. I ran to her, and she buried her head in my mane. Finally she drew back and sobbed horribly, a long, broken howl—I remember when I howled that way.

A pearl fell out of her mouth.

Hind begged me to take her away. She promised that she knew how to use the floating platforms, and we could run from Amberabad to another city, where her affliction of pearls might be of some use to us. And so the girl strung with black beads packed her cakes and some few of her precious books and climbed onto my back, proudly astride, as her father had told her over and over not to do.

Someone had poisoned her, having no business in Amberabad but to vex my friend, causing pearls to spit out of her mouth whenever she spoke. Because her father did not like her books or her cakes or her pets. And so we descended together from the city in the sky, through the branches and clouds, onto the long road, and she clung to me all the way down, her long fingers gripping my mane so as not to fall while I bounded off of the last amber plank. I faithfully kept my tail from curling tightly upward, as the recalcitrant thing is wont to do, so as not to hurt her. We stepped onto the thick grass and my friend laughed to feel it, solid ground beneath her. We went into the world, in search of another city, one which would love us and hold us close, one which would be rich and bright and richer still for our walking and singing and laughing in it.

She materialized, stood on her familiar padded paws and looked around at an utterly strange place. After every long sleep the world was more changed, and after every incarnation the next lifetime became more bizarre. The last time, a Norwegian peasant woman fleeing “holy” wars, she had come by a long sea voyage to what was called the New World. Now she found it so new she scarcely recognized it as Earth at all. Under her paws lay a great slab of something like stone, but with a smell that was not stone’s good ancient smell. Chariots of glass and metal whined by at untoward speeds, stinking of their own heat. Grotesque buildings towered everywhere, and in them she could sense the existence of people, more people than had ever burdened the world before, a new kind of people who jangled the air with their fears, their smallness, their suspicion of the gods and one another.

As always when she awoke from a long sleep she was very hungry, and not for food. But this was not a good place for her to go hunting. It terrified her. Running as only a cat can, like a golden streak, she fled from the chariots and their stench, from the buildings and the pettiness in their air until she found something that approximated countryside. Outside the town there was a place with trees and grass.

And on the grass were camped people whose thoughts and feelings did not hang on the air and make it heavy, but flitted and laughed like magpies. We don’t care what the world thinks, the magpies sang. Some of us are thieves and some of us are preachers, some are freaks and some are stars, some of us have three heads and some can’t even get one together, and who cares? We all get along. We are the carnival people. Whether you are a pimp or a whore or a queer or a con artist, if you are one of us you belong, and the world can go blow itself.

A cat is one who walks by herself. Still, A carnival! Yes, thought she, the golden one. This is better. I may find him here. For she was very hungry, and the smells of the carnival were good. She was, after all, a meat eater, and a carnival is made of meat. The day was turning to silver dusk, the carnival glare was starting to light the sky and the carnival blare rose like magpie cries on the air. The cat trotted in through the gate, to the midway, where already the grass was trampled into dirt.

“Come see the petrified Pygmy,” the barkers cried. “Come see the gun that killed Jesse James. Come see the Double-Jointed Woman, the Mule-Faced Girl, the Iron Man of Taipan.”

High striker, Ferris wheel, motordrome, House of Mirrors—it was all new to her, yet the feel in the air was that of something venerable and familiar: greed. Carnival was carnival and had been since lust and feasting began. French fries, sausage ends, bits of cinnamon cake had fallen to the ground, but she did not paw at them. Instead, she traversed the midway, past Dunk Bozo and bumper cars, roulette wheel and ring toss, on the lookout for a man, any man so long as he was young and virile and not ugly. Once she had seduced him and satisfied herself, she would discard him. This was her holy custom, and she would be sure she upheld it. A few times in previous lives she had been false to herself, had married and found herself at the mercy of a man who attempted to command her; she had sworn this would not happen again. Eight of her lifetimes were gone. Only one remained to her, and she was determined to live this one with no regrets.

On the hunt, she found it difficult to sort out the people she saw crowding through the carnival. Men and women alike, they wore trousers, cotton shirts, and shapeless cloth shoes. And leather jackets, and hair that was short and spiky or long and in curls. She became confused and annoyed. True, some of the people she saw were identifiable as men, and some of the men she saw were young, but they walked like apes and had a strange chemical smell about them and were not attractive to her.

“Hey there, kitten! Guess your age, your weight, your birthdate?”

The cat flinched into a crouch. Though the words of this New World language meant nothing to her, she could usually comprehend the thoughts that underlay words, and for a moment she had unreasonably felt as if the guess-man’s pitch had been directed at her. Narrow-eyed and coiled to run, she stared up at him.

“Yes, Mother! Congratulations.” He was facing a pudding-cheeked woman with a pregnant belly. “What would you like me to guess? Name? Age? Date of your wedding day? Yes? Okay. Fifty cents, please. If I don’t get it right, one of my fine china dolls is yours.”

He was not talking to the cat after all. Why would he? she scolded herself. He offered his invitation to the dozens of people walking by. And many of them stopped for him, perhaps because there was a wry poetry in his voice, or perhaps because he was young and not ugly. Slim, dressed in denims and boots, he stood tall though he was in fact not very tall. In front of the booth that marked his place on the midway he took a stance like a bard in a courtyard. Something about him made her want to see his eyes, but because he wore dark glasses she could not. His face was quiet, unexceptional, yet he seemed like one who had something more to him than muscle and manhead.

Not that she needed anything more. It was enough that he was young and not ugly. He would suffice.

She trotted on, looking for a private place to make the change. It would take only a minute.

Within a few strides the familiar musky scent of lust touched her whiskers. Her delicate lip drew back from her tiny pointed teeth, and she slipped under a tent flap. She had reached the location of “Hinkleman’s G-String Goddess Revue.”

This will do.

Inside, all was heat, mosquitoes, dim light, and the smell of sweating men. Forty of them were crowded in there, watching a stripper at work on the small stage. The golden visitor leapt to a chair back and watched also. No one noticed her. She sat with her long tail curled around her slender haunches, and its softly furred tip twitched with scorn for what she was seeing.

Stupid, simpleminded cow. She uses her body like a club. She does not know how to walk, how to move, how to tease. Her breasts are huge, like melons, and that is all she knows.

The thoughts of everyone in the tent swarmed in its air thicker than the mosquitoes. Therefore the cat quickly knew that the stripper, called a kootch girl, was expected to more than mildly arouse the men, called marks. She knew that the kootch girl’s repertory was limited by her meager talents, that the girl was planning to get out of her G-string in order to achieve maximum effect. She knew that several of the marks were thinking in terms of audience participation. She knew that in back of the tent was a trailer where those with fifty dollars might buy some private action later.

The men roared. The stripper was flashing her pudenda. Jumping down from her perch, the cat darted backstage, hot with scorn and anger.

Is that what they call a woman these days? Can no one show them how it should be done?

Backstage were two more strippers, spraying one another’s semi-naked bodies with mosquito repellent. Mr. Hinkleman, the owner, was back there also, lounging in a tilted chair, bored, drinking gin between hot hoarse stints in the bally box. Off to one side was a booth with a flimsy curtain, a changing facility, not much used by women who were about to take off their clothes in front of an audience anyway. The golden cat walked into it. A moment later, a golden woman walked out.

“Carrumba!” Mr. Hinkleman, who had seen a lot over a career spanning twenty-three years in the carnival, nevertheless let his chair legs slam to the floor, jolting himself bolt upright. “Hoo! Where did you come from, honey?”

She answered only with a faint smile. There had been a time when she was more fully human, when she could talk. But that ability was a thousand years and four lifetimes gone. And she did not regret the loss. With each incarnation she found there were fewer to whom she wished to speak. Talking meant little but thoughts told her more truth.

“What’s your name?”

The level look she gave him caused him to suddenly remember, without any resentment, the training his mother thought he had forgotten years before. He stood up to greet the naked visitor more properly.

“Hello, ma’am, welcome to—to wherever the heck this is. I’m Fred Hinkleman.” His hand hovered in air, then went to his head as if to remove an invisible hat in her presence. “What can I do for you? Do you want to be in my show?”

“She don’t got but little tits,” one of the strippers put in scornfully. The girl from onstage had joined those backstage, and the three Hinkleman Goddesses stood huddled together like moose when the scent of panther is in the air.

“I know how she gets to look glowy like that all over,” complained the dark kootch girl who was billed as the Wild Indian. “She just eats carrots, that’s all. Any of us could do it. Eat carrots till they’re coming out the kazoo.”

Fred Hinkleman seemed not to hear them at all. His gaze was stuck on the newcomer. “Tell you what,” he said to her. “You go onstage and show the yahoos what you can do. I’ll go introduce you right now. What should I call you?”

Her mouth, smiling, opened into a soundless meow.

“Cat? Good. Suits you.” He went out, and a moment later could be heard promising the marks “the hottest new talent in the adult entertainment business, the sleek, feline Miss Cat, uh, Miss Cat Pagan.”

“Just another pussy,” one of the strippers muttered.

She made her entrance onstage. Contrary to the logic of the word “stripper,” it is not necessary for one actually to be wearing anything in order to perform. Cat was wearing nothing at all, but that was not what made the already-sated marks go wild and leap up and stand on their chairs in order to see her. It was the way she wore it.

She did not bump or grind or flash for them. All she did was walk, pose, hint at possibilities, and possess the stage as she had once possessed the known world. Dignity clothed her as if in robes of gold. No mark thought of touching her. Every mark knew that the price of going to her afterward would be more than he could afford.

Looking out over them, she knew she could have any one of them—and many of them were young and well built, far more showily muscled than the man in sunglasses on the midway. But no. It was him she wanted. There was something about the way he stood. He had dignity, too.

When she considered that the marks had seen enough, she went backstage and helped herself to clothing: a short strapless red dress with a flared skirt, a wisp of lace to throw around her shoulders, a picture hat. The other Hinkleman’s G-String Goddess Revue girls watched her silently and did not try to stop her. Now that she had showed her stuff she was one of them. In the backstage air she could sense their stoical acceptance, and it surprised her. She had expected dislike, even enmity. But these women were carnies. They breakfasted with snake-eating geeks and sword swallowers, they bathed in buckets, camped in mud, and every day they were expected to perform magic, creating glamour out of dirt. So what was one more freak or freakish event to them? If the stranger wanted to show up out of nowhere, that was okay. They had weathered storms before.

“Honeycat, you’re a walking advertisement,” Hinkleman remarked when he saw her. “Go on, go do the midway. Have some fun.”

The kootcher with the melon breasts went along with Cat—in order to be seen with her, Cat surmised, noticing the other woman’s thoughts the way she noticed gnats in the air, with only a small portion of her attention. Melons wanted to make the best of a situation. Melons was not unwise.

“Been around the carousel a time or two, honey?” Melons chirped.

Married, she meant. Ignoring her, Cat headed straight toward the Guess Anything stand. Now that she was in her human form, she would make sure that the man there saw her. From her experience she knew this was all that would be necessary. She would smile just a little and look into his eyes, and when she walked away he would follow her as if she led him by an invisible chain of gold.

There was a crowd around the stand. The Guess Anything man was popular. Asked the standard questions concerning age and weight, he was often wrong, always on the side of flattery, and he gave away many prizes. But asked to guess far more difficult things—birthstones, marital status, number of children or grandchildren, home address, the place where a mark went to high school or nursing school or prison—he was often correct, uncannily so. And there was a quiet charisma about him. People stood listening to him in fascination, giving him their money again and again.

At the edge of the crowd Cat waited her turn with scant patience. She was not far away from him; he should see her… Wishing to enjoy his reaction, she felt for his mind with hers and found it easily. In fact, it awaited her. And yes, there was an awareness of her presence in him, but it was unlike any awareness she had ever experienced in a man before. His cognition of her had no lust in it. Despite her lithe, barefoot, red-clad beauty, her appearance did not affect him in that way. Not at all.

“Who’s next?” He took the mark’s money and handed it to a boy in the stand, a good-looking youngster. His son, Cat knew from touching his mind at that moment. The mother was long dead but still very much missed. He was raising the boy himself.

As the boy made change, his father guessed the mark’s age and weight, both incorrectly, then handed over the cheap ceramic prize with a smile. It was a warm, whimsical smile. Amusement in it: the “fine china dolls” were so worthless he made money even when he gave them away. But also something of heart: he liked to make people happy. Cat suddenly found that she liked his smile very much.

“Who’s next?”

“Right here, Ollie,” Melons said, nudging Cat forward. “Hey, Ollie, this here’s Cat.”

“I know. We met earlier.” He faced her. His smile was wonderful, but he still wore the dark glasses, even though night had fallen. She could not see his eyes.

“Hello, Cat,” he said. “Welcome.”

Melons said, “She wants you to guess her age, I guess. I don’t know. She don’t seem to talk none. Cat got her tongue.” Melons laughed at her own weak joke, chin angled skyward, breasts quaking. Ollie smiled but did not laugh.

“Some other time I’ll guess for her if she wants,” he said. “Not right now. I don’t think that’s what you really want right now anyway, is it, Cat?” His tone was mild, friendly. There was no flirtation in it.

Frustrated, she thought, I want you to take off those barriers over your eyes. I want to see into them and make you follow me. I want to know you carnally, and I want to know what you are.

No, his thought replied directly to her thought. No, sorry, I can’t do any of that. Not even for you, milady Cat.

Old Foss watched the Old Man out barefoot in his nightshirt ranting in the rain; at least the rain had chased away the boys throwing mud and rocks. The Old Man had black stains along his back and a welt on his forehead, not that he noticed. But as night pushed over the town, growing from shadows leaning along the ramshackle red tile roofs, darkness spreading like ink across a tabletop, Old Foss knew there were worse things than rain or boys with rocks. Soon, the Jumblies would rise from the water’s edge to bring the Old Man to sea in a sieve. And anyone who goes to sea in a sieve, of course, never returns. They sink and they drown.

The rain wept against the glass as Old Foss watched impassively behind the window. The Old Man ran back and forth across the cobbled street, his long white nightshirt soaked and clinging to his ungainly frame, his paunched belly and skinny pale legs. His long bedraggled beard leaked, sloughing off water when he shook his head and bellowed: “Where is my Jumbly Girl?” The Old Man knocked on every door he came to, but no one answered for they knew the old Englishman too well.

At first, when the fugues came on, the locals had only shaken their heads at him, then argued with him in broken English or too fluent Italian, especially when the rain came up fast. They pushed him towards the villa he and Old Foss rented; but when the confusion came upon him he would only look at them uncomprehendingly, or look at their doors long after they had shut them with the oddest expression of thwarted desire, then he would wander away again and knock on another wrong door. For no one could see the Jumblies but him and Old Foss. None could know of his time with his Jumbly Girl but Old Foss and himself. Old Foss and he is how it should be for the Jumbly girl would bring him only death for all her promises. Why couldn’t he see that, Old Foss thought crossly, twitching his tail, and was it really so much as all that to love a Jumbly Girl?

It started with a funny feeling in the bottoms of my feet. Something is going to happen. Perhaps an earthquake. That’s what it feels like. But perhaps terrorists on the way. Whatever it is, something’s coming.

Why did I (of all people), an old lady, get this warning while everybody else is going on as usual? Have I a special talent nobody else has?

But the cat feels it, too. He’s been shaking his paws as if they feel exactly like my feet do. He looks at me as if to say: Why don’t you do something? I tell him, “I will.”

It’s coming closer. I’m getting out of here before everybody tries to leave at the same time.

Though could it be that I’m just feeling the future in general. Disaster will come to all of us and at my age it can’t be that far away. I’ll be as dead as most all of humanity already is. Mother… Dad… Dostoyevsky.

But can I take a chance that this tingly feeling is just because of the normal run of things?

If only I knew when. And also who to tell? I’d like company through all this. Not that a good cat isn’t company enough and I do talk things over with him, but a person would be nice, too. I can’t think of anybody to tell who would believe me or wouldn’t just get in my way as I try to leave in search of safety.

That tingly, rattley vibration is getting worse, rising from the ground, up through my feet and rattling my spine. This morning I could even feel it from my fifth floor apartment. I ran for the central hallway. I stood there for twenty minutes. Then I grabbed Natty, put his harness and leash on him, and ran outside and down the block and huddled under a tree. Again I waited. The cat was shaking as much as I was. A sure sign that I’m right. I ran farther but had to stop to catch my breath in a doorway near the park.

Here, in a place where pigeons are always wobbling along, there wasn’t a single one. Not one! That scared both of us even more.

I must have looked just how I felt because somebody asked me what was wrong. I said, “Just a dizzy spell is all.” I didn’t want anybody else to know. I wanted to get out and safely away before any of the others found out something was going to happen.

I check the feelings in my feet again. I feel a rumbling for sure, by now so strong I wonder why everybody doesn’t feel it. Well, all the better then, it gives me plenty of time to escape.

A mountain top would be a good place, nothing could fall down on me from up there and water wouldn’t reach, but there aren’t even any hills around here. I’ll head west, though I don’t know if there’s time, but out in the country will be better than the city. I’ll bring all my money and my raincoat.

I go home, eat a big last meal, pack a knapsack with cat food (it’ll do for both of us), my vitamins, and go. I bring Natty in the top part of the knapsack. He doesn’t mind. He’s glad I’m finally doing something.

I ask a taxi driver to take me twenty dollars worth towards the west. He’s nice, he takes me even farther. He doesn’t care that I sneaked a cat into his cab. I ask him to come with us. We’d like the company. Especially such a nice man and with a cab to ride in. I tell him why I was getting away. I say we should hurry before the roads get too crowded with people trying to escape. He doesn’t say so, but I don’t think he believes me. He prefers getting back to work.

So I start walking. He drove me a good ways into the suburbs. I never expected to get this far in just one day. Even though I’m still scared, this is all turning out fine. I stand still and check the bottoms of my feet again, and, yes, no doubt about it, danger, though I keep reminding myself that life is just temporary anyway and at my age even more so.

But right now I have to find someplace to spend the night. I don’t want to use up any more of my money than I have to. It has to last at least to the Rockies.

I keep walking well into the night. I was hoping to get beyond the little houses and warehouses to farm land, but no such luck. I wanted to sleep in some country place, a forest or a park. Finally I’m too worn out to go on. I drop where I stop. There isn’t a bush or a tree in sight, just warehouses, and airplanes keep coming over low. I’m so tired they don’t bother me except for waking me up early in the morning. I worried the cat would get scared and run away, but he stayed with me. I keep his leash on most of the time but I don’t attach it to anything. He’s too old to run off.

It had seemed like a good idea at the time. Of course, Philip Danby had only been joking, but he had said it in a serious tone in order to humor those idiot New Age clients who actually seemed to believe in the stuff. “I want to come back as a cat,” he’d said, smiling facetiously into the candlelight at the Eskeridge dinner table. He had to hold his breath to keep from laughing as the others babbled about reincarnation. The women wanted to come back blonder and thinner, and the men wanted to be everything from Dallas Cowboys to oak trees. Oak trees? And he had to keep a straight face through it all, hoping these dodos would give the firm some business.

The things he had to put up with to humor clients. His partner, Giles Eskeridge, seemed to have no difficulties in that quarter, however. Giles often said that rich and crazy went together; therefore, architects who wanted a lucrative business had to be prepared to put up with eccentrics. They also had to put up with long hours, obstinate building contractors, and capricious zoning boards. Perhaps that was why Danby had plumped for life as a cat next time. As he had explained to his dinner companions that night, “Cats are independent. They don’t have to kowtow to anybody; they sleep sixteen hours a day; and yet they get fed and sheltered and even loved—just for being their contrary little selves. It sounds like a good deal to me.”

Julie Eskeridge tapped him playfully on the cheek. “You’d better take care to be a pretty, pedigreed kitty, Philip.” She laughed. “Because life isn’t so pleasant for an ugly old alley cat!”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” he told her. “In fifty years or so.”

It had been more like fifty days. The fact that Giles had wanted to come back as a shark should have tipped him off. When they found out that they’d just built a three-million-dollar building on top of a toxic landfill, the contractor was happy to keep his mouth shut about it for a mere ten grand, and Giles was perfectly prepared to bury the evidence to protect the firm from lawsuits and EPA fines.

Looking back on it, Danby realized that he should not have insisted that they report the landfill to the authorities. In particular, he should not have insisted on it at six p.m. at the building site with no one present but himself and Giles. That was literally a fatal error. Before you could say “philosophical differences,” Giles had picked up a shovel lying near the offending trench, and with one brisk swing, he had sent the matter to a higher court. As he pitched headlong into the reeking evidence, Danby’s last thought was a flicker of cold anger at the injustice of it all.

Tara’s gown was so tight she couldn’t breathe. Karl would make her leave the dress on, later, when she would lie back and take it.

She followed him into the dining room.

The only other woman at the table laughed like a man and didn’t cringe from their crude talk. There were seven men at the table. It was the only table in the room.

Tara noticed the thickness of the linen tablecloth, wondered what it would be like to sleep on. It was changed after every one of the thirty courses. Cutlery and plates didn’t clang when collected. A distraction was performed in the corner of the room as the table was cleared each time; a naked woman bending over backwards to grasp her toes; a dwarf gulping beer from a glass taller than he; two children kissing and touching each other intimately; a cat forced somehow into a large bottle, with just enough room to turn around around aroundroundround; a naked man with idiot eyes and an enormous penis which reached, engorged, almost to his fat, pink, hairless nipples, his swollen breasts; a woman with festering cuts who held her arms and legs for display like a fashion model, showing maggots at their chewing work; a tall, oiled, hairless girl scoring herself lightly with a sharp blade till she shone with a thin coating of blood; an old man stamping weakly, a foot in either of two transparent buckets, stamping wine grapes; a man, drawn and gray, dancing a jig, his raised arms revealing hairless armpits, his shrivelled genitals thumping against his thigh, each leap a day less to live.

All these distractions so the diners would not notice that linen leaving. She fingered the material under the table, wishing her knees were bare so she could feel its texture there.

In an avuncular gesture, Karl gave her a ginger lolly, dug from the corner of his coat pocket. To gum her mouth, keep her silent on this important night.

As they talked around her, mouths full of octopus legs, lettuce soup, deep fried salt and pepper periwinkles, china tea, wine, she thought of the story of Little Black Sambo, such a racist story now. Little Black Sambo begged his mother to make pancakes for his breakfast, and she agreed, if he would run to the stall for butter. “Oh, yes,” he agreed. Such a treat.

But on the way back he was spotted by the man-eating tigers. They chased him up the tree, and the sun melted his butter all over their heads. This made them angry, so they ran around the tree faster, faster, around, around aroundroundround, trying to make Little Black Sambo dizzy, fall off.

But it was so hot and they ran so fast, the lovely butter yellow fur of them began to blur, as they ran faster. They ran so fast they turned into butter which Little Black Sambo took home to his mother.

“Such lovely butter,” she said.

“Oh, yes,” he said, as he sat down to his plate stacked high with springy, hot pancakes.

Tara had loved that story as a child; had always wished for that plate of pancakes to be hers. As the next course came out on a sizzling hot dish, she wished again for those pancakes.

Karl took her plate and piled it with the gray flesh. The other woman had not smudged her lipstick. She seemed to suck the food in without using her lips or chewing. Tara watched the woman eat the meat and did not ask what it was.

“Like it?” the men asked Tara one by one. She had not swallowed the single mouthful she had taken. It sat on her tongue. She smiled around it.

They waited for her answer. It was a trick, of course. If she said yes, the meat would be bear, or cat, or human, the naming of which would make her stomach heave. If she said no, it would only be beef, done in a special way, and she would be the foolish one.

Karl would not let her go to the toilet, although the meal went for many hours. It was a test of strength. She thought perhaps the irritation in her bladder could be mistaken for sexual desire, so perhaps that was the purpose.

She swallowed the meat and did not answer the question. The plate was so large it must have carried the entire animal; what could be so fleshy? They ate sago broth with opium and honey, stir-fried ginger, caraway seeds, coriander, carrots, peas, spinach, cabbage, potato and onion. They ate tomatoes stuffed with avocado and truffle and pimento. Each course came out, the table cleaned between each, and the entertainment went on in the corner of the room. The men ordered the servants about loudly, each trying harder to be more demanding. Karl told them such servants were called tigers, once. That ladies’ attendants were called pages. The men began to say, “Hey, tiger,” to the servants, because it was the only way they would tame such a creature, by giving its name to a servant.

Tara and the other woman didn’t call their attendants page.

As the soup was being prepared, the man who claimed to have caught the tigers came to their table. They all knew he was the hunter, and they wanted to hear the story of how brave the tigers were, how the man nearly died.

“The tiger becomes obsessed with the animal it kills. It doesn’t leave the slightest taste, will eat the internal organs, the eyeballs, the hooves, the strings and bows of that beloved creature.”

The hunter watched Tara, took in her position, her breasts, the colour of her skin.

The hunter moved around the table as he spoke. They ate quails, tossed the bones over their shoulders, and the crackle of the bones seemed to be his jungle floor, his boneyard.

The hunter circled the table, making them twist their necks.

Karl scraped the last of the sauce from the central bowl. Somewhere teeth crunched on gristle.

“The flesh may rot, and still the tiger will stay. Near that meat it will live, sleep, for as long as it takes.”

The next course arrived, each person given a different portion, some a little more, some a little less. She watched them stare at each other’s plates, and covet that extra mouthful. Asparagus spears with hollandaise sauce, radishes always within reach, and phallus-shaped bread, which they tore with their hands and did not take the time to butter.

“The tiger will not share with any scavenger. A deer may last six days, a buffalo perhaps weeks. Because the tiger has to work so hard, it has to spend its life hunting. So a large kill is like a little holiday. He doesn’t want to cut it short.”

“So all a hunter has to do,” Tara thought, “is watch the vultures overhead, and find that tiger’s feast. And there will be an over-fed, rested tiger, protective of his feast, not expecting danger. All a man has to do is take the prey with a full stomach.”

Even at just a mouthful of each dish, her belly was swollen against the tight metallic shine of her dress. Her mother had worn a tight dress too, and her grandmother. They wore tight dresses and remained silent, they lived with legs ready to spread and died on a whim.

“Oh, yes. Until the tigers learnt that man knew the habit. Then the holiday was over; just a mouthful, a single meal, from every kill, and then away, to find more food. A tiger needs thirty cattle a year to live. How much do you think a man needs?”

No one knew. They were no longer listening to the hunter. The other woman had begun the story of a recent assignation, how foolish the man had looked. Each man at the table imagined how he would impress her. They became anxious for the Tiger’s Penis Soup, wanting its juices, its life-giving, ever-growing goodness.

The hunter pulled a chair behind Tara. She alone was interested in how the tiger died. As the soup reached the table, the man Karl wanted most to impress said, “I’ve heard that when a man or beast dies, his soul enters his penis. So we gobble the tiger’s soul.”

The table laughed heartily. Tara opened her mouth wide at Karl’s prodding, as if she, too, found this a delight.

She wondered, but did not ask, where the soul of a woman goes.

The soup cost thousands for the nine of them, the rest of the banquet the same again, and then there was the wine. They need two tiger’s penises for a tureen large enough for ten. It is rare to find two males together in the wild; they like their space, and their females, to themselves. The soup is considered an aphrodisiac.

The stock is chicken, a fresh chicken straight into the pot, cooked over day-long heat, strained through muslin. Most delicate. The flesh is discarded, given to the cat or used for the spring rolls.

And then the soup was before them, presented in a gold-edged porcelain tureen made by the finest potter. The hunter presented the lid, allowed steam to reach the noses of those at the tables.

“Just the smell,” he said, breathing deeply.

“I paid for that steam,” Karl’s boss said.

To Tara, it smelt like boiled meat.

There was silence as they swallowed the soup. They waited, each mouthful, for the promised erection, the promised desire, and they winked at each other like young boys pretending to have sprouted pubic bush.

Tara swallowed her portion, did not bite the secret ingredients, let them slide down her throat.

Later, she would think of the tiger’s penis as Karl pretended virility. It was so long, twisted. She would feel his tiger’s dick reaching up through her intestines to her lungs, where it would squeeze, squeeze, would not let her breathe.

The other woman sucked the fingers of the man to her left; the man to her right licked his lips, his chin, his cheeks, with a rough tongue.

“What about the rest of the tiger?” the boss said, “do we get any of that?”

“Oh, no,” said the woman serving them. She was a short woman, dressed in heels which made her tall. “That tiger, he’s thrown away. No good. Skin with a bullet hole, stained, all that. Once, a tiger would have been all used up, in another time, when people believed such things. His meat would be swallowed for the stomach trouble. His fur used for ladies’ clothes. His brain for curing laziness, sure enough. His gallstones to give better vision. And his tail; in the bath, it makes your skin soft.

“His eyes will stop convulsions and all his fangs, his claws, his whiskers, make a powerful love charm.” She laughed. “People were so silly. Now, we just take him for his penis, for the soup. And how was it?”

The man opposite Tara gave the waitress a squeeze, a pinch, a wink.

“Just lovely. Lovely.”

The next course was brought out, a mountain of batter pieces, holding surprises Tara didn’t want to receive.

As Karl reached for another lychee, she realised how big his hands were, like baseball mitts or paws, broad, short fingers, a vast expanse of palm.

The hunter said, “Once the tigers couldn’t be caught by taking their food, the hunter would set up a Tiger Kill.”

Only she was listening. Only she could hear.

“The hunters tie a nice deer to a tree and wait. They rustle and make noise, because the tiger hears well. He sees well, too, but his sense of smell is poor unless he is hunting the prey of love. If the creature was perfectly still, well-hidden, quiet, the tiger wouldn’t find it. Only when the creature tries to run does the tiger leap.”

They ate quince tart, pears stewed with ginger wine and steeped with mint, honeycomb with bee’s wings still attached, vanilla and chocolate ice cream, then at last the meal was over. The men went to their rooms where women had been summoned. The other woman went with the boss. Tara went with Karl.

He lay on the bed, his stomach a pink balloon. When he shut his eyes, she locked herself in the bathroom and relieved herself.

“Out you come,” he said. She could tell by his playful tone he was naked.

Then his tiger’s penis was at work, and his fingers were about her throat, he was squeezing, squeezing. She reached for a weapon and grasped his belt, lifting it high and beating his back with a thick thwap. He enjoyed its caress.

She became aware of a figure standing over him. It was the hunter. He raised his club and hit Karl on the side of the head, knocking him off her, away from her.

“Thank you, my dear,” the hunter said. She gathered her clothes as he crouched over the body, nestling the penis in his hand. As she left the room, she heard the thud and click so familiar to her; a brother’s knife; a father’s; a lover’s knife.

She closed the door quietly behind her so as not to disturb the hunter at his work.

She didn’t use the lift; she wanted to feel the strength of her muscles. As she descended the stairs, she rubbed at her make-up so it ran in streaks over her face, brushed out her curls with spread fingers. The hunter could not be expected to spare her again.

Next time, she would be ready.

For anything I know it was all due to jetlag, that curious fugue state in which the body has leapt over space and time as if in seven-league boots, with the protesting spirit, or soul, striving to catch up. Or due to the jetlag medication. Or else that I was betwixt and between stages of my life, or thought I was, and my subconscious was trying to tell me different. Whatever the cause, I walked between waking dreams, intermittent hallucinations, in which what was real and what wasn’t mingled and merged madly. In the end it didn’t seem to matter—I just went with the flow.

It all began in the Sydney International Departures check-in, where the teenage girl ahead of me exclaimed:

“Ohmigod! Tell me I’m hallucinating!”

Gladly, sweetie, I thought. I hadn’t slept the previous night and was decidedly on edge, my body on automatic pilot, my mind darting every which way. Terminals always are artificial, in their air-conditioned saccharine blandness, and today this one seemed particularly unreal. That what seemed might actually be a genuine unreality was a notion I could welcome.

I followed the direction of her pointing, black-varnished finger, to see four figures and a trolley piled high with flight cases. And a part of me that I had resolved to leave behind pawed the ground and said: Aha! A band.

The trouble with music promotion, if you’ve done it too long, or long enough that it stops being fun, or fannish, is that you automatically categorize market niches. The girl was an obvious Goth. The band was a little more difficult: tatts, black clothes, long hair can indicate anything from stadium rockers to Norwegian Black Metal, who are more trouble than they’re worth, as they have an annoying habit of burning down churches. Probably Speed Metal, I decided, as the girl started hyperventilating. Cult-level, if they’re at the economy counter. I could guess at the festival they’d just attended and even take a punt at the promoter. My old life pawed at the ground again, raring to start a professional chat, about festival logistics, equipment, transport. Not the least of the fun would have been giving the Goth fangirl the vapours. To her, I was over forty, and thus nigh death—but I could still best her in the catty cunning stakes.

Instead I suppressed the urge, and stood meekly in queue. Was I not en route to a new life, leaving all frivolous, pop-culture things behind? The band passed through check-in, then security without incident. If the Goth fangirl got autographs I didn’t see, for I was deep in Duty-free. What can you get a serious-minded man, apart from seriously good drink? Then I stretched my legs for the last time until Changi, a long walk around the corridors with my headphones and German-language CD. The Goth fangirl I spotted in the lounge for Vanuatu, which would surely ruin her graveyard pallor. My flight had been called, I was handing my boarding pass to the Stew, when a bloc of black joined the queue—the band again, clutching tacky outback souvenirs. Not as evil as you like to pretend, I thought. Like most metallists—who upon acquaintance tended to be polite and obliging, the reverse of the Christian rockers.

I have flown so much it has become routine, but even the tedium failed to deaden my jangling nerves. I watched a movie, The Jane Austen Book Club, and decided I didn’t believe a word of it, apart from Jimmy Smits playing against type as a nice family man. I ate automatically, listened to my tapes again, dipped into my E-book, which was programmed with everything about Germany, from the Rough Guide to the Brothers Grimm. The Stews handed out cocoa, started dimming the lights. Outside it was dark, as if we were passing through an interminable tunnel. It was 2 a.m. my time, and there would be light, and an airport, in a few hours. I took a pill, and, just to make sure, chased it with the last of my dinner red wine.

And awoke, with sleeping passengers all around me and my nerves jangling again. My feet, in their airline socks, felt cramped, so I wandered down the aisles. As I neared the back row, the middle aisle, I had a sense of being watched, and traced it to a hulking dark shape, almost entirely muffled by an airline blanket worn like a hoodie. Eyes showed beneath it, large and lustrous. Beside my watcher were several other forms, similarly shrouded in blanket and curled up in the narrow seats like a pet in a basket. I caught only a glimpse of dyed Mohawk protruding. The band, I thought.

It was easy enough to catch my travel dress on a protruding, blanket-clad limb—elbow or knee I don’t know, as he overflowed his seat in several directions. As I crouched down to extricate it, the “Sorry”, “No I’m sorry” morphed into a whispered conversation. The accidental proximity of air travel can make for unlikely fellow travelers having even more unlikely conversations. But, as I crouched beside him, whispering into the space beneath his hood, and he whispered back in an accent I couldn’t trace, it all seemed natural and easy—in retrospect too easy.

In dreams or drug trips, events occur without apparent connection, and very quickly. They cut to the chase, without small talk—and that’s what happened here. Within a short time we were getting personal in a mixture of English and German, a language I was still learning.

“Warum?” Why? Why was I traveling?

“Ein mann,”—the truth, just to stave off any possible pass.

“And what sort of man, to take you half the length of the world?”

“Ein musik-mann.”

He emitted a soft laugh, breathy, harsh and nasal, and with more wryness than mirth in it.

“Nobody you’d know. He plays classical, and conducts a small avant-garde consort at the Music School in Bremen.” I pronounced it the correct German way, Bray-men.

“Donkey,” he said.

“I beg your pardon.”

“Katz.”

“Yes, I’m Jane Katz,” I said. Had he been ever a client, in some previous band incarnation?

That laugh again, but less wry than simply pleased. “Donkey, katz,” he repeated. “And hund. And rooster.”

“Oh,” I said, catching on. “Well, Grimm to you too!” I had just read the story, on the E-book, and it was fresh in my mind. On the first day of Christmas my truelove had even sent to me a stuffed toy, the tourist symbol of the city, a donkey with a dog on its back, on the dog a cat, on the cat a rooster. The Four Musicians of Bremen, made in China.

“That’s an interesting story, more than it seems. Like most of Grimm.”

“It begins with a donkey,” I said.

“Too old to work on the farm anymore.”

“And rather than die for the only thing valuable left on him, his skin, he gallops away, down the road to Bremen.”

“And there I think is an in-joke. Why does the donkey head for Bremen? To be town-musician. Which indicates the Bremen musicians had the reputation of being worse than donkeys.”

“Interesting,” I said. “He says he can play the lute.”

“How can a donkey play the lute?”

I considered this. “With his teeth, like Hendrix. Or using one hoof on the fret, like a bottleneck or slide.”

“Vir gut,” he said. Very good.

“The hound says he can play kettledrum,” I said, leaping ahead to the next character. “Maybe with the stick tied to his tail.”

“To show you can teach an old dog new tricks.”

“He too has run away, because he is too old to hunt, and his master has nearly beaten him to death.”

“Then they meet a cat.”

“Wet through and thoroughly pissed-off.”

“Escaped from drowning.”

“Because she is too old a hunter, even for mausen.”

“What does the cat play?”

I thought again. “Probably some kind of string instrument. With those plucking claws.”

“They’ve already got a guitarist.”

“Bass, then.” I had dabbled at bass, like various girls in ’80s bands. When I got beside rather than on the stage I gave it up, but still harboured respect for the bassists I encountered. They were cool cats mostly, especially the jazzers.

“And the last one,” he said. “The rooster.”

“Crowing as loud as it can.”

“The phrase is ‘through marrow and bone.’ Vir gut, very creepy.”

As is your being word-perfect in a story I only just read, I nearly said. Odd little doubts stir below the surface of dreams, but are never expressed.

“His fate is to be made into soup.”

“That’s farm economics,” I said. “Utterly unsentimental and practical. I grew up on a farm.” And got as far away from it as I possibly could.

“And so the rooster completes the band,” he said.

“As lead singer, with his penetrating voice.”

“All of them seeking in Bremen ‘something better than death,’ as the Esel, the donkey says.”

Now that really was creepy. If there is something that everybody fears, and avoids as hard as they can, it is growing old, finding yourself beyond a useful date, and the end nearing. Old boiler, that’s what they say of women, only suitable for soup, like Grimm’s rooster.

I think at that point I returned to my seat, too unsettled to continue. Next thing I was waking from a totally unrestful doze, with the cabin lights on for the descent into Changi. There I used the free internet, to send a message to Bremen, and because the line about something better than death was really getting to me, some Duty-free but still expensive night cream. At the bar, I encountered the band again, looking thoroughly unslept—and noticed no Mohawks. Nor were any of them particularly big. And, I suddenly realised, whoever I was talking to, he was older, because he kept emphasizing the animals’ age. A young man wouldn’t do that, they believe they’re immortal. Get off that fire escape now, drink this water, no, don’t try and snort wasabi… all from days when my promo work shaded into nannying.

Who was my conversationalist of the night-flight? Someone out of the common, certainly unlike the fellow passengers lining up for airport security yet again, in their tracksuits and jeans, the children clutching Harry Potter. He must be on the German-bound flight, he spoke German to me. I scanned the line of passengers, but drew a blank.

No matter, I was really tired now. I wrapped myself in blanket, closed my eyes—and kept waking every fifteen minutes or so, all the way to Hamburg. Mein mann had told me of a spot, hidden but known by seasoned travelers, where you could sit in reclining chairs and watch the take-offs. I found it, but still couldn’t relax before my connecting flight to Bremen.

The flight was full of German business-folk, who disembarked with their briefcases, or waited somberly by the carousel for their suitcases. There the strangeness started again: I swear I saw a sniffer dog leap onto the carousel. Oho, a drug bust! I thought, glad this time I wouldn’t be getting any client out of trouble. Instead the dog took hold of a suitcase handle in its mouth, and dragged it off the carousel, for the benefit of a man who merely picked it up, and walked away, the dog trotting briskly at his heels. The things they teach seeing-eye dogs these days! I thought.

I found that Germans took dogs everywhere: into department stores, museums, so a dog in an airport soon seemed not so strange. Not as strange as the new country, even with a native guide in the shape of the musik-mann. How to describe him, except in terms of the stereotypes of love, of race? He was tall, blonde, blue-eyed, handsome (natch!), earnest, methodical, serious. Reader, I fucked him—as soon as we got back to his tidy apartment. Then I slept, despite my resolve to stay up until I was in sync with the local time. Sex does that to me, even earnest, methodical, serious sex. I woke, to find him dressing for a class he had to teach. Why didn’t I come and take a look around the wintermarket while he worked, see the Christmas schmuck (baubles), and drink Lumbaba (coffee with rum)?

So, not long afterwards, I was alone in Germany, in below zero cold, bundled up in woollens, at a Christmas funfair. Here were mistletoe branches, the first time I had seen them in their cold green actuality, there were merry-go-rounds, plywood silhouettes cut into Christmas scenes, gingerbread hearts. It was a festival that said: Be merry and keep the frost giants away!

“Ich möchte ein Kaffee,” I said carefully to the man at the Schmaltzküchen. Then, “Danke Schon,” when I got the coffee.

It raised my body temperature a notch. But still I felt the chill penetrate the sleeves of my coat, cutting through to the marrow and bone of my forearms. Looking around for something to do, preferably warm, I saw a tour for the historic Rathaus, that’s Ratehouse (Townhall) auf Deutsch and in English.

I paid my euros, joined a queue again, of people in padded jackets and woolly hats, usually with technicolour plaits attached, a fashion that was no doubt practical but too hippie for my tastes. Inside was warmth again, and our guide.

The bi-lingual tour was detailed, but told with a light, witty touch. I learnt about the Hanseatic league, Bremen as republic, Bishop Ansgar who evangelized Scandinavia from Bremen, about 1000 years ago. And Sydney town is only two hundred years old, I thought, unless you are Yothu Yindi.

Interesting though the tour was, odd details kept distracting me: the dog that padded along with the tour, as if it too had paid its euros to attend, a gargoyle face squinting from a riot of wooden carving, the wry, nasal laugh of the guide…

“Someone has just asked me about the symbol of the city, the key. It was not like now, where keys of the city are given as honours. Not a symbol of opening, but closure. Medieval cities were walled, against what might attack them from outside the zone of tilled fields and pasture, from robbers to robber barons. The keys were closely guarded, for behind the walls were not tolerant places. They had to be that way, to survive.”

I looked properly at the guide for the first time. He was large, male, graying, about my vintage, nondescript almost by intention, as if trying to fit in as precisely as a jigsaw piece.

“Since you’re talking about symbols, what about the musicians of Bremen?” I asked.

It was as if the rest of the tour group had vanished, and we were just talking to each other one to one, as we had in the plane.

“They never got here,” he said. “They got diverted.”

“By the lights of a house in the forest,” I breathed.

“And when they looked in the window…”

“They saw firelight and robbers, feasting around a table.”

“Their mouths started watering, with the hunger.”

“And they slunk back into the dark.”

“Discussed what to do.”

“And devised a plan.”

“They watched and waited until the robbers were drunk, but not legless.”

“Then the donkey sank down on his knees, and the dog scrabbled onto his back.”

“The cat elegantly leapt onto the back of the dog from her vantage point on a water barrel.”

“The rooster swallowed his nerves, and fluttered onto the back of the cat.”

“The donkey stood carefully, lifting the pyramid of animals.”

“And a monstrous silhouette appeared in the robbers’ window, followed by an equally demonic sound, in concert. The donkey brayed.”

That laugh again.

The dog, who had been sitting quietly by, ears pricked, emitted a small bark.

“The cat wailed,” I said, groping in my linguistic memory for the word. “Das miaoen!”

From the tour group came the final sound in the quartet, a crowing ringtone from a mobile phone. It broke the spell, as the guide sighed, and wagged a finger at the perpetrator. Now he was just a tour guide again, and I was just another tourist, alone in an alien country.

On the morning of the Seventh Day, the Garden of Eden was calm and peaceful. The Serpent stretched. She had to fix that. Perfection was very, very boring.

She crawled through the tall grass to the pride of lions sunning their fur in a clearing by the Euphrates’ bank.

“Hey, did you know what lambs are made of? Meat. Fresh and juicy meat. Why would they be made of meat if you weren’t supposed to eat them? Go on, give it a try,” she whispered to a lioness, her scaly tail pointing at a herd grazing close by. She had never liked lambs.

The lioness rolled over, her amber eyes half-closed. “Too hot to run. The lambs don’t bother me, so I don’t bother them.” She yawned and continued her nap.

Disappointed, the Serpent moved on to a brown bear eating berries by the river.

“There are fat fish swimming in the water,” she told him. “Juicy, writhing salmons and carp, filled with nutrients for great fur. And they taste much better than berries.”

The bear looked up, his muzzle smeared with juice. “But I like berries. Why should I get wet and harass the carp?”

By noon, the Serpent was annoyed. None of the Garden’s animals had humored her. God’s last creations, the furless bipeds, seemed promising, but she hadn’t dared to approach them. According to the sparrows’ gossip, He had made the male after His own image. And judging by His blatant preference for lambs, the outcome couldn’t be good. Curled around the Tree of Life, the Serpent decided that Creation needed fun—mischievous—creatures. She had watched Him do it from clay with the humans. How hard could it be, especially with the aid of the forbidden fruit? Across the grove, the man scratched his crotch, watching the clouds. It couldn’t get any worse than that.

She gathered a pile of soft soil from around the roots of the Tree of Life and curled around it, kneading and shaping to the best of her abilities. Perhaps the humans’ opposable thumbs had indeed some merit. It took her the better part of the afternoon, but she finally stretched and inspected her handiwork.

The creatures looked good: one male and one female, for all creatures needed a mate in life and an accomplice in mischief. She had made the male bigger and thick-headed, with fast claws and toxic urine to leave his mark all over Creation. The female was more delicate, but faster and fierce when defending her litter. The Serpent lashed her forked tongue and hurried up the Tree of Knowledge. The full moon was ascending and she hadn’t finished.

She grabbed a fruit and squeezed it over the creatures, anointing them.

“I give you knowledge of Good and Evil,” she whispered, and a sudden breeze shuffled the foliage around them. The clay animals trembled, the mud turning to fur and flesh. “I give you sight to see through the dark hours of the night and through the darkness of souls. May the moon be your ally, may the sun warm your fur. Tread fast, tread soft, and knock down all fragile objects in your path.”

She breathed in and spat at them. “I give you free will, your choice either poison or cure. Whatever divine spark lays in me, I share it with you.”

A tremor ran through the Garden. She rubbed a fruit from the Tree of Life on them, and dried clay fell off, revealing soft fur underneath.

“Cats, I give you Life. Go forth and multiply. Do it often, do it loudly, until your offspring overruns Creation.”

The kittens blinked and sniffed the air. Their eyes glowed, reflecting the moonlight. When they noticed each other, she held her breath. Their eyes grew huge, their backs arched and their tails stood rigid, upright and fluffed up. Bolder than her ginger mate, the calico kitten dared a sniff of his muzzle. A shy lick followed the sniff, and in no time they were curled together, grooming each other. Soon, they grew bored of grooming and started chasing each other’s tails.

Perfection isn’t always serious.

The kittens stalked unsuspecting fireflies, shredded leaves, and clawed their way up onto the branches of the Tree of Life. The Serpent lay belly up beneath it, laughing herself breathless. It was almost dawn when the kittens, exhausted, climbed down. They curled by the Serpent’s coiled body and fell fast asleep, their whiskers and tails twitching in dreams of hunt and mischief.

True perfection is never boring.

Justin sensed the tiger as soon as he reached the street. He didn’t see it, or hear it. He simply… sensed it.

Leaving the warm safety of the Baxter’s porch light behind him, he started down the sidewalk that fronted State Street feeling the night swallow him in a single hungry gulp. He stopped when he reached the edge of the Baxter’s proper line and looked back wistfully toward their front door.

Too bad the evening had to end. It had been just about the finest evening he could remember. Not that Steve and he hadn’t had some fine old times together, the way best friends will; but this particular evening had been, well, magical. They had played The Shot Brothers down in Steve’s basement while Mr. and Mrs. Baxter watched TV upstairs. When the game had been going well and everything was clicking, Justin could almost believe that Steve and he really were brothers. And that feeling had never been stronger than it had been this evening.

When Mrs. Baxter had finally called down that it was time to go, it had struck Justin as vaguely strange that she would be packing him off on a night like this, seeing how he and Steve slept over at one another’s homes just about every weekend. But this evening was different. Despite the snow, home called to him in sweet siren whispers.

Mrs. Baxter had bundled him up in his parka, boots, and mittens, and then, much to his surprise, she had kissed his cheek. Steve had seen him to the door, said a quick goodbye, then hurried away to the den. Funny thing, Steve’s eyes had seemed moist.

Then Justin had stepped out into the night, and Mrs. Baxter had closed the door behind him, leaving him alone with the dark and the cold and… the tiger.

To begin with then, my name is Lucy Manners and I am twelve years old. Last summer my older sister, Tiz, married Mr. Rainworth. It was a sad change for me because Tiz and I used always to be together. My brother, Gowland, is with Lord Wellington in Spain, fighting the French. So when January came Papa said he was tired of my long face and he sent me to school to Mrs. Hackett’s in Great-Titchfield-Street.

On the first day two girls approached me. I was pleased, thinking to make new friends, but I soon discovered that that was not their intention. Instead they called me skin-and-bones, said that my muslin was frayed and my shoes were old-fashioned. There was no end to my faults according to Emmeline Twist and Amelia Froggett, and not content with calling me names, they tried to make me afraid with silly stories about ghosts.

“Oh! Have you not heard?” said Emmeline, “The school is haunted by a mad teacher who was turned out of her place by Mrs. Hackett!”

“She lives in one of the attics,” added Amelia. “Sometimes you can hear her speaking in foreign languages and sometimes she will call to you down the chimney.”

“And,” said Emmeline with great satisfaction, “those girls who she speaks to die before the week is out!”

“I do not believe it,” I said. “Who has died? No one at all I expect.”

One bleak and windy Thursday Mrs. Hackett gave Emmeline and Amelia and me a long list of German verbs to learn. I had no wish to sit with them, so I climbed up to the top of the house, to a room beneath the attic. I had not been there long when I heard a noise from overhead—a soft, irregular thumping. I barely had time to consider whether or not I was frightened when a starling tumbled down the chimney and began to fly about the room, battering itself against the walls.

A voice hissed down the chimney. “Englishman! Englishman! My bird has flown down! Fetch it up if you please!”

I thought this a little rude. Nevertheless I called politely up the chimney, “I beg your pardon, ma’am, but what do you want it for?”

“Foolish question!” cried the unknown lady. “To eat it of course!”

I opened the window in the hopes that the bird would fly out. Then I ran out of the room and up to the attic. It was very dim, with just one skylight that let in the wind and the rain. It smelt of dead things. Something crunched beneath my foot; I looked down and saw that there were little bones, as of birds and mice, scattered over the floor. A dark shape was moving in the dimness. I could not at first make it out, but then I saw a woman’s face and my heart fell to the bottom of my stomach. Her face was at the wrong end of her. It was at the bottom of the dark shape and her chin was no more than an inch or two from the floorboards.

I thought I would faint.

Suddenly she stepped into the shaft of gloomy light and I saw that she was not a woman at all. She was a lioness for the most part. She had besides, a pair of bedraggled wings and a sweet, but anxious face. Her human breasts were modestly covered with a ragged blue shawl and her hair had been put into curl papers long ago and never taken out; it was full of knots and tangles. She was altogether such a wretched sight I could not help but pity her from my heart.

We stared at one another. Her lion’s tail went from side to side thoughtfully.

“I beg your pardon, ma’am,” I said, “but are you not a sphinx?”

“No,” she said, airily. “I am the Sphinx. Egyptian sphinxes are many, but the Greek Sphinx is only one.”

“Oh!”

There was a little silence.

“I wonder, ma’am,” I began timidly, “if I might comb your hair for you? It certainly needs it and it is a thing I love to do.”

She gave a haughty little nod.

So I pulled a comb from my pocket and began. Her hair was exactly the sort I liked best—a soft, golden colour with a natural curl.

“Good maids are hard to come by,” I said. “The same for monsters as for human ladies, I suppose.”

“Monsters!” she cried, indignantly. “Who do call you a monster?”

“I beg your pardon, but you have the body of a lion and the face and breast of a woman. And…”

“What nonsense you talk! The world is full of monsters, of which you are certainly one—a fact I would usually be too polite to mention, but you drive me to it. A lion is a sphinx’s body with a cat’s head on top—which is a very horrid thing. Man is worse. In man the beautiful head and breast of a sphinx are defiled by the arms of a nasty ape and legs like a forked parsnip.” She shuddered. “Ughhh!”

There was a whirr of wings in the darkness. Her head whipped round.

“Bird,” she said. “Starling. They are not a bit kind. They call me spiteful names.”

“Oh!” said I. “I know what you mean. There are two ignorant, ill-bred girls here who do the same to me.”

“Bite them in two,” she suggested.

“I do not think Mrs. Hackett would like it if I did that and, anyway, my mouth does not open so far.”

“Mine does,” she said with much satisfaction.

Despite her quarrelsome nature we became friends that day and whenever Mrs. Hackett set me work to do by myself, I would run up to the top of the house and climb out of the skylight on to the roof and there we would sit companionably together. She loved to be in high places looking down at everything. If ladies or gentlemen rode along Great-Titchfield-Street on horseback, she would peer over the parapet and mutter, “Centaurs. Nasty creatures.”

One day as I was combing her hair, I said, “How did it happen, Sphinx, that you came to London?”

“Oh, that is easily told. I came in a ship attended by handsome young mariners. It was all arranged by a Frenchman called M’sieur Fauvel. You see, Lucy, M’sieur Fauvel lives in Athens and it is his task to purchase the most beautiful Greek carvings and sculptures and send them back to France. Imagine his dismay when he discovered that a Scottish lady and gentleman, Lord and Lady Elgin, had arrived in Athens for the same purpose! Furthermore Lady Elgin was a great favourite of the Sultan of Turkey (who governs Athens). M’sieur Fauvel was obliged to watch as great treasures (which ought in his opinion to have adorned Paris) were shipped away to his enemies in London. So he came to me and made me a present of the blue knitted shawl and begged me on his knees to come to London to persecute its citizens. Which, of course, I was glad to do.”

“Good God!” I exclaimed. “But how will you do that?”

“I will ask them riddles and when they cannot answer I will strangle them.”

“Oh! Don’t!” I cried. “Please don’t. I mean why should you? It is not as if M’sieur Fauvel’s present was particularly nice. I can bring you a much prettier shawl than that shabby old blue thing.”

“It is not a matter of presents,” she said with dignity. “I am the Throttler. I am the Questioner. I am the Guardian of Dark Doors. I am the Dweller in High Places. I am a Blight upon Man.”

“Well, if you say so, dear. It really doesn’t sound very nice. But if I remember the tale of Oedipus correctly, he guessed the answer to your riddle and you were obliged to throw yourself down and dash yourself to pieces.”

The Sphinx yawned. “Yes. Oedipus did claim that, did he not?”

“When will you begin? In London, I mean?”

“Any day now,” she said and began to lick her paw.

Privately I did not think she was quite so industrious as M’sieur Fauvel had hoped when he chartered his ship.

She had no great opinion of Mrs. Hackett’s methods of teaching. “I do not think you are learning anything useful, Lucy. Fortunately I know many wise teachers. My brother Cerberus—he who guards Hell—will fetch up dead people to tell you all their secrets. And then there is Lamia—a delightful girl with the most elegant green-scaled tail! Oh, you will dote upon her! She will show you how to pluck your eyes out of their sockets and put them back in again!”

She never explained to me why she thought this would be useful.

One day in late February when it was near to sunset, I said, “Sphinx dear, you know that I am very fond of you and that I wish you would stay in London. But if you continue in your plan to ask the citizens riddles, then I think you must ask me first and let me save London if I can.”

“You know that if you give a wrong answer then I must begin by strangling you,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Do you think you are so much cleverer than the rest of London?”

“No, indeed! I don’t think I am clever at all. But I know you, Sphinx, and perhaps that will help.”

“Very well.”

My heart thumped like anything. She was silent so long that I grew even more nervous and could not help saying, “Is it going to be the one about the creature that goes upon four legs in the morning, and two legs at noon and three legs in the evening, because if so…”

“Certainly not! No, I have it. Ready?”

“Yes, Sphinx dear.”

I thought for a moment.

“Well,” I said. “Someone that is praised to the skies is a hero. And I know how much you hate heroes because they always try to make themselves seem important by exaggerating their exploits. And, by the bye, Sphinx, did I ever tell you, that the French Emperor, Napoleon Bonaparte, is considered to be very heroic? And so I think it is a little contradictory of you, dear, to be doing his work for him. As for the second part, well, a place that gives comfort to travellers is an inn.” I began to cry—I could not help it. “And so put together they make ‘heroine’. And it really is kind of you to say that I am one. And I am really very, very sorry to make you dash yourself into pieces.”

The Sphinx smiled. “Clever girl,” she said, and then gave my face a lick with a pointed pink tongue—which I suppose must be a Sphinx’s kiss.

And then she leapt off the parapet, down, down to Great-Titchfield-Street.

And, oh!, what nonsense that old story of Oedipus is! For the Greek Sphinx has eagle’s wings and how could a winged creature fall to her death?

Up, up she rose again with slow beats. London was sombre and dark beneath her, like a city of graves and mysterious spirits—which sounds rather dreadful, I know, but I was glad of it, for it was the very thing to please her. The last I saw of her she was above the silver ribbon of the Thames turning east towards Greece; and all the red-and-gold glory of the sunset was reflected upon her, the Dweller in High Places.

I got the healing touch when I was 16 years old kneeling over my dying cat Benjamin in my bedroom. He was trying to crawl under the bed to die, but I wouldn’t let him, hauling him out and wrapping my body around him, my forehead pressed against his. He was a year older than me. He’d been there my whole life. I couldn’t imagine life without him. He stopped breathing, his heart stopped, and I prayed for him, though I rarely prayed then, and I never pray now, squeezing him, imprinting my will on him, picturing him raised from the dead, alive and well. I didn’t know what else to do, sobbing, absolutely heartbroken, torturing myself with Joan Baez singing “Old Blue” on the stereo:

Benjamin stirred under my hands, his heart beating hard and steady against my palm. I released him, and he rose and walked to the door, his tail erect. He wanted to go out. An hour later, he wanted back in, and he was hungry. He looked good. He looked real good.

I took him to a vet after his healing to get him checked out. I didn’t take him to his regular vet, Dr. Diderada, who Ben had been going to since he was a kitten, figuring he’d never believe this was the same half-blind stiff-legged neutered tom living on borrowed time he’d basically given up on a week before. I told this new vet Ben was a stray I was adopting, and he guessed him to be about four, in perfect health. All the vets over the years guessed him to be about four, in perfect health. That’s 28 in cat years, not a bad year for me. Benjamin seemingly picked an age he liked and stuck with it. I, meanwhile, kept getting older. I quit taking him to the vet years ago, having exhausted all the convenient ones. Ben was over it, and I couldn’t see spending the money to be reassured semiannually that my cat was immortal. He never even had an ear mite or a flea, as if even the insect world knew he was operating under a special dispensation.

Thirty years later, I was 46, and I still had Benjamin. I’ll do the math for you. He was 47. That’s 329 in cat years. Even if you gave him nine lives, that made each one more than 36 years. No. Benjamin was not a normal cat.

Back when Ben was 17, my parents readily believed Dr. Diderada had resurrected him with some good vitamin supplements. They were wish-upon-a-star, somewhere-over-the-rainbow kind of people, but even they wouldn’t believe a 47-year-old cat. After I left home, I didn’t see them on my own turf very often, but I always lied and said Ben was a new cat. They thought I was odd for naming every cat Benjamin, but they already knew I was odd—I was their son. It helped that Ben was a fairly generic gray tabby with white boots and a nondescript meow. My ex-wife Penny knew Ben for seven years, living with him for five, but she never noticed he never aged. She wasn’t a cat person. She wasn’t any kind of animal person I ever discovered. She liked watching monkeys in the monkey house, but that’s not the same, is it? I know it sounds weird, but that’s one of the reasons we broke up. I just couldn’t be with somebody who didn’t like animals. When it came down to it, she didn’t like people all that much. Which makes sense—people are animals, smart worrisome animals, but still animals.

Anyway, she peacefully coexisted with Ben, and he was never an issue. I never dated anyone else more than a year or so, and nobody who spent much time around Ben. Then at 46, I started going out with Shannon. That didn’t last long—the just going out. Our third date started Friday at four—she took off work an hour early—and ended Tuesday at noon. I told Benjamin it was the closest to a resurrection I’d experienced in my life, and maybe it would help me understand him better. He pointed out, however, that death was a necessary precondition of resurrection. He played dead and sprang back to life, a favorite trick of his, flicking his smartass tail. I’ve always talked to Ben. He hasn’t always answered.

For some time, Shannon and I had been practically living together, shuttling back and forth between our houses, but she preferred my place because Benjamin lived there. Benny Boy, as she called him. If he’d been a man, I would’ve been insanely jealous. To say they hit it off is to say Juliet was sort of into Romeo. He was equally passionate about her.

This was all good. She loved me too, Benny Boy’s lifelong companion and confidante, the cleaner of the cat box, the keeper of the can opener, not to mention healer extraordinaire. But then she started asking questions. “Isn’t he due for a checkup? Shots or something?”

I made the mistake of just putting her off, and then she saw a little reminder card from one of Benny Boy’s many vets in my mail, this one saying he was at least eight years overdue on just about everything. So she called and made an appointment. That’s kind of how Shannon was, which was one of the many things I liked about her, except insofar as it pertained to Benjamin, because I’d always figured that sooner or later reality was going to catch up with me. It was like I made a deal all those years ago that I couldn’t handle my cat dying right then, but Some Day there’d be no choice, and it would hurt even worse when it finally came. But somehow, if I could just keep his death and persistent life a secret, nothing had to change.

“How old is he?” Shannon asked when they met. About four, I said, never anticipating I’d be caught in my convenient lie. So how could he be eight years behind in his shots? I feared every step I took down this road with Shannon meant Some Day was coming soon. But I couldn’t stop myself. I couldn’t stop her. Benjamin, closed up in his carrier, in his stoic, dignified way, neither stopped nor started, but was carried along by the tide of events—and by his carrier of course—to the vet.

“Mr. Prendick, there’s a lady here to see you.”

I must have jumped, because I remember my knee banging into the desk. In the years since I had moved to this obscure corner of England, where even the trains did not come and I could walk over the hills for hours without seeing a human face, I had received only one visitor, the local vicar. There must have been something in my speech, perhaps even in my face, that agitated him, because he would not stay for dinner, and he left without urging me to attend services in the small stone church where he preached, in the valley below. I was sorry to see him leave. He had seemed like a reasonable man, although his inquisitive brown eyes and pinched face, a probable indication of early poverty, reminded me of a lemur. In all that time, I had never been threatened with a visit by anything that could remotely be described as a lady.

“A what?’ I wondered what Mrs. Pertwee meant by a lady, exactly. Perhaps one of the female parishioners who lived in the village that surrounded the stone church, with its post office, pub, and collection of six or seven houses, coming to solicit for some missionary society to help our savage brethren.

“A lady, Mr. Prendick. She—” Mrs. Pertwee hesitated. “She calls herself Mrs. Prendick.”

I tripped over the chair. The next day, Mrs. Pertwee had to wash the spot where my fountain pen had sputtered on the carpet with strong soap.

She was waiting for me in the parlor, a sanctuary that Mrs. Pertwee only entered to do whatever housekeepers customarily do to horsehair sofas and china ornaments. I had not used the room since renting the cottage, and had seen no need to alter it.

She was heavily veiled.

“Edward,” she said. “How nice to see you again.”

We are divided beings. One half of me had known that it could not logically be she. The other half had known that no one else in the wide world could claim to be my wife. That other half had been right. I could not mistake her voice, almost too deep for a woman, with a resonance to it, as though she were speaking from the depth of her throat. Like a viol.

“You look better than when I last saw you, on the island.”

“Catherine.”

“So I have a name now. Did you forget it when you wrote this?” She held up a copy of my book. The book I should never have written, that my alienist had urged me to write. “Did you forget that we all had names? What a terrible liar you are, Edward.”

“Let me see your face,” I said. The veil was disconcerting. I needed to know, for certain, that she really was speaking to me, that this was not some sort of hallucination.

She laughed, like an ordinary woman, and lifted her veil.

When I had last seen her, her face had been seamed with scars, the remnants of Moreau’s work. Now, her face was perfectly smooth. The high cheekbones were still there, the nose aquiline, the best I think that Moreau ever created. The eyes yellow and brown together, like Baltic amber. The tops of her ears were hidden by her hair. Were they still pointed? She noticed me looking, laughed again, and pulled her hair back. They looked completely human. I am a scientist, and no judge of female beauty. But she was the most beautiful woman I have ever seen.

“How did you…”

“Walk with me, Edward.” She indicated the French doors, which opened onto the garden. Her gestures were unnaturally graceful. “Let’s reminisce, like old friends. Eventually, I’ll have a favor to ask of you. But first, I’ll tell you what I’ve been doing with myself for the last few years. Since, that is, you left me to die on the island.”

“I didn’t leave you to die.”

“Didn’t you?”

I followed her into the garden. It was an ordinary autumn day, the sky gray above us, with clouds blowing across it, and a herd of sheep like clouds in the valley below. I could see a dog driving them, first from one side of the herd and then the other. Somewhere, there was a man, and it was at his whistle that the dog ran to and fro. What dogs had done, and men had done, and sheep had done, for a hundred years. A quintessentially English scene.

“To what fate, exactly, did you intend to leave me?”

Her voice took me back to another scene, an entirely different scene. The southern sunlight on Moreau, lying in the mud, flies crawling over his shirt where the linen was stained red.

“The Puma,” said Montgomery. “We have to find her.”

“How did she do this?” I felt sick, mostly I think with shock. I had never, somehow, imagined that Moreau could die. Certainly not like this.

He pointed to Moreau’s head. “She struck him. Look, the back of his skull is smashed in. Probably with her own fetters. She must have torn them out of the wall. Damn.”

As a word, it seemed completely inadequate.

We followed her trail easily enough. She was heading, not toward the village of the Beast Men, but toward the sea. I wondered for a moment if she might try to drown herself, as I had tried to drown myself, my first few days on the island. But Beast Men did not do such things. They killed others, not themselves. It took a man to do that.

“There she is.” Montgomery gestured with his gun.

She stood, up to her hips in the water. She looked at us, then shook herself, flinging spray from her wet hair. She walked toward us. So might Aphrodite have walked when she rose from the sea. But this was an Aphrodite with skin like gold rather than ivory, and the eyes of a beast. Everywhere, her body was covered with fresh scars.

“My God,” said Montgomery. “So that’s what he’s been hiding from me.”

“Hiding?”

“For a month, he wouldn’t let me into the laboratory. He said the process was working at last. And look at her. She’s his masterpiece. Poor bastard.”

“I killed the one with the whip,” she said. Her voice reverberated, like waves in a cavern beneath the sea. “Will you kill me for what I have done?”

“We will not kill you,” said Montgomery. “It was not right to kill him, but we will not punish you for it.”

“Have you gone mad?” I whispered to Montgomery. I aimed, but Montgomery caught hold of my arm.

“Can’t you see what he did to her?” he whispered. “The man was a brute.”

“It was right to kill him, and it gave me pleasure,” she said. She walked out of the sea, like a statue of burnished gold.

With that unprepossessing statement began our time with the Puma Woman.

Her scars faded, but they remained visible all over her face and body. She looked like a South Sea islander, marked with cicatrices.

Montgomery took her to live with us, in the enclosure. He gave her his bedroom and slept in mine. We cleaned out the laboratory, releasing whatever still had its own form, killing the results of Moreau’s experiments. We had food, guns, and M’Ling, Montgomery’s favorite Beast Man, to guard us at night. We planned to wait until the next supply ship came, and then—what? I assumed that we would leave the island, leave Moreau’s abominations to their own fate. But what about her? Montgomery seemed to have become particularly attached to her. She walked around the enclosure in one of his shirts, tucked into a pair of his trousers tied at the waist with rope. She looked like a gypsy boy.

She walked so quietly that I never knew, until she spoke, that she was beside me. When I launched one of the boats to go fishing, she would suddenly appear, help me push off, and leap into the boat. Montgomery would stare at us from the shore, with one hand on his gun belt. I didn’t want her with me, but what was I supposed to do, push her into the water? She would sit, silent, and stare at me with her golden brown eyes—a woman, and not a woman. No woman could have sat so still.

It was Montgomery who named her Catherine. “Catherine, get it?” he said. “Cat-in-here. There’s a cat in here!” He had been drinking. He watched her cross the enclosure, so lightly, so silently, that she seemed to walk on her toes. I did not like the way he looked at her. Perhaps he had initially been disgusted by the Beast Men, as I had been when I landed on the island, but he had long ago grown accustomed to them. They seemed to him human, and natural. I suspect that if you had set him down in the middle of London, he would have exclaimed at the deformity of the men and women who passed. She was Moreau’s finest creation. Montgomery had always had his favorites among the Beast Men: M’Ling, Septimus, Adolphus. What did he think of her?

It was he who taught her to shoot, to read the books in Moreau’s collection. As she learned, he answered all of her questions, first about the island, then about the world from which we had been isolated, and finally about Moreau’s research. If we had been rescued then, I think he would have taken her with him. I imagined her scarred face, her long brown limbs, in an English drawing room. But it seemed to me, sometimes, that she had a preference for my company. And sometimes at night I would imagine her as I had first seen her, rising from the sea like Aphrodite, fresh from her kill.

Once, sitting in the boat, she said to me, “Prendick, how large is your country?”

“Much larger than this island, but smaller than some countries.”

“Like India?”

“Yes, like India. Damn Montgomery. What has he been telling you?”

“That your English queen is the Empress of India. How could a country as small as yours conquer a country as large as India?”

“We had guns.”

“Ah, yes, guns.” She looked at her own complacently. “So, like on this island, it was a matter of guns and whips.”

“No!” I tossed a fish with bright orange scales into the basket. “It was a matter of civilization.”

“I see,” she said. “You taught them to walk upright and wear clothes and worship the English queen. I would like to see this English queen of yours. She must have a long whip.”

What were the Beast Men doing all this time? With the control that Moreau had exercised over them gone, they reverted to their natural behaviors. The predators formed a pack, with Nero, the Hyena-Swine, at its head. They moved to the other side of the island. The others stayed in the village, with Gladstone, the Sayer of the Law, to organize what vestiges of government they retained and Adolphus, the Dog Man, to organize their defense. Septimus, the jabbering Ape Man who had been the first Beast Man I had met in my initial flight from Moreau, attempted to create a new religion for them, with various Big Thinks and Little Thinks, but the others would have none of it. Montgomery thought that we should give them guns, but I refused. His sympathy for them angered me. Let them all perish, I thought, and let the earth be cleansed of Moreau’s work.

So we went on for several months. It was, I later realized, a period of calm between the killing of Moreau and what came after.

She walked through the garden, stopping once to touch a lily with her gloved hands. “Your native English flowers,” she said, “have many admirers. But have you seen anything more beautiful than this? The original bulb was brought generations ago from the slopes of the Himalayas. It flourishes in your English soil.”

“Where did you learn botany?” I asked her.

She did not answer, but walked ahead of me, over the fields, up the hill, so quickly that I had difficulty keeping up with her. At the top of the hill, we looked down on the valley, with its English village sleeping under the gray sky.

“Would you like to hear what happened after you abandoned me on the island?”

I nodded. I looked at her again, sidelong. What had she done, to become what she was? She had a way of moving her hands when she spoke that was charming, almost Italian, although no woman could have had her fluidity of movement. Her grace was inhuman.

“I lived in the cave we had shared. I kept track of the time, as you had taught me. I had a gun, but no bullets, and anyway there were only a few of his creatures left on the island. You think that I cannot say his name, but I can—Moreau, the Beast Master. It was burned into my brain, remember? Doubtless it will be the last word I say before I die. But that will not be for a long while yet.

“You wrote that the Beast Men reverted to their animal state. What a liar you are, my husband! You know that would have been an anatomical impossibility. But you do not want your English public to know that after Montgomery’s death, after the supplies were gone, you feasted on men. Oh, they had the snouts of pigs, or they jabbered like apes, but they cried out as men before you shot them. Do you remember when you shot and ate Adolphus, your Dog Man, whom you had hunted with, and who had curled up at your feet during the night?

I looked down at the valley. She was bringing them all back, the memories. My hands were shaking. I lifted them to my mouth, as though they could help with the wave of nausea that threatened to engulf me.

“They were animals.”

“So too, if your friend Professor Huxley is right, are you an animal. As am I. You are startled. Why? Because I mentioned Huxley? I have done more things than you can imagine, since I left the island. I too have taken a class with Professor Huxley, whom you described so often. Your descriptions of his examinations served me well. He thought, of course, that the questions I asked him after his lectures were theoretical. He was delighted, he told me, to find such a scientific mind in a young lady. He did not know that I had been created by a biologist. I cut my teeth, as you might say, on the biological sciences. Or had my teeth cut on them.”

During our time together on the island, after the death of Montgomery, I taught her about the origin and history of life on earth. We looked at geological formations, examined and cataloged what we found in the tidal pools, or the birds that roosted on the island. There were no species native to the island higher than a sea-turtle that laid its eggs there, but we studied the anatomy of the Beast Men we shot, discussing their peculiarities. I explained to her what Moreau had joined together, how pig had been joined to dog, or wolf had been joined to bear. I even, eloquently as I thought then, showed her what Moreau must have intended, where the beast became the man.

“You feasted on them too.”

“They were my natural prey. If I had still been the animal Montgomery bought in a market in Argentina, I would have hunted them without thought, without scruple. But I’m getting ahead of myself. For months, I was alone. I reverted, not in appearance but in behavior. I hunted at night, ripped open my prey, ate it raw. After I thought all of Moreau’s creations were gone, I lived on what I could find in the tidal pools—fish when I could catch them, clams that I smashed open on the stones. I dug for turtle eggs. I was half starved when the Scorpion came. There was nothing left on the island but some rabbits and a Pig Man that had somehow managed to escape me, and rats that I could not catch in my weakened state. They would have devoured me eventually.

“It was searching for the remains of the Ipecacuanha. The captain took particular care of me. He thought I was an Englishwoman who had been captured by pirates, and brutally treated. I have to thank you, Edward, for teaching me to speak so correctly! I did not realize, when I imitated your accent, that I was learning to sound like a lady. Montgomery’s cruder accent would not have suited me so well. I told the captain that I had lost my memory. He took me to Tasmania, where the Governor treated me kindly, and a collection was taken up for me. Imagine all those Englishmen and women, donating money so that I could return home, to England! It was a great deal of money, enough for my voyage to England and a surgeon, a very good surgeon, to complete what Moreau had left undone.

“After the surgery, I had no more money, and money is necessary in this civilized world of yours. But I found that men will pay money for the company of a beautiful woman. And I am beautiful, am I not, Edward? I should be grateful to the Beast Master. I was his masterpiece.”

She smiled, and I did not like it. Her canines were still longer than they should have been. Sometimes, when we lay together, she had bitten me. I wanted to believe she had done so by accident, but had she?

“And so I began to study. In this England of yours, a woman cannot attend universities, but she can attend scientific lectures. She can read at the British Museum. And if she is beautiful, she can ask as many questions as she wishes, and important men are flattered by her interest. I would venture, Edward, that I am now more knowledgeable about biology than you are. I intend to put that knowledge to use. But I need your help. I have come here,” her hand swept to indicate the hills around us, the birds that were flying above, the clouds floating against the gray sky, “with the most vulgar of motives. I require money. You see, I have a particular project in mind. The surgeon who repaired me, who erased the scars that Moreau had left, is a Russian émigré, a Jew driven out of his country by religious persecution. How fond your species is of persecutions! For two years I have worked with him, learning everything he could teach me. I am now, he has been generous enough to say, even more skilled than he is. Your women who are agitating for the vote believe that they should have professions other than marriage. I too wish to have a profession. I propose to follow in my father’s footsteps and become a vivisector.”

I stared at her. Gazing over the hills, with the wind whipping her skirts back and tossing her veil, she looked like the figurehead on the prow of a ship. But where was she headed? Moreau’s work had brought us once to disaster. Was she now truly planning to continue what he had begun?

After his death, the more peaceable Beast Men had developed the habit of coming to the enclosure to trade what they grew in their gardens for our flour and salt. Twice a week they came, crowding into the enclosure, like an English market crossed with a menagerie, or a Renaissance painting of some level of Dante’s Inferno.

Montgomery should have noticed that Nero and the Wolf-Bear Tiberius had entered the enclosure. M’Ling should have been guarding the gate, but his attention was elsewhere. The Beast Men had begun adopting our vices, for which Montgomery was in no small measure to blame. He had taught them the use of tobacco, which he traded for food, and to pass the time he had whittled a pair of dice, with which they gambled for onions, turtle eggs, whatever the Beast Men had brought to trade. That morning, M’Ling was gambling with the Beast Men.

“Why does she carry a whip?” I heard the shout and went to the window. I usually avoided these market days. I still found it disconcerting to be in the company of so many of Moreau’s creations.

Montgomery stood by the door of the storeroom, which held our barrels of tobacco, flour, biscuits, salted meat. Next to him stood Catherine, dressed as he was, with a gun in her holster and a whip tucked into her belt. All around stood the Beast Men with the goods that they had brought, and in the back, close to the gate, stood the Hyena-Swine.

“She is one of us, one of the made. Why does she carry a gun? Why does she carry a whip? Let her join her own people.”

The Beast Men stood, staring, and I could see the inquisitive look in their eyes.

“Why does she not come to us?” said Catullus, the Satyr. “We have few females. Why does she not come to live in our huts, and work in our gardens, like the other females?”

“Yes,” said the Ape Man. “Let her live with us, with us, with us! She can be my mate.”

Then others spoke and said that she could be their mate as well.

I could see Montgomery looking puzzled. He had been up late drinking, the night before, and was still nursing a hangover. He could not understand this rebellion among the usually peaceable Beast Men. From where he stood, he could not see the Hyena-Swine.

I could see Catherine’s hand on her gun.

The Beast Men began arguing among themselves, each claiming her. Moreau had never made enough Beast Women, and they were constantly trying to lure the ones they had away from each other. One pushed another. Soon there would be a fight.

I stepped through the doorway, into the enclosure.

“The Master, who has gone to live among the stars, and watches you from above, has intended her for another purpose. She will not be any of your mates. She will be without a mate, but will bear a child that will perpetuate your race. That is the purpose for which he has created her. She will be the mother of a new race of men. Bow to her, who is dedicated to such a high purpose!”

They stared at me.

“Bow!” I said, raising my gun. I could see the Hyena-Swine slinking through the gate.

One by one, reluctantly, they inclined their heads.

“Hail to the Holy Mother,” said the Ape Man. He had always been sillier than the rest.

“Well then,” I said. “You may continue to trade. There will be no punishment today, despite your disobedience.”

That night, Montgomery lit the bonfire. He lit it every night. If there was a ship sailing within sight of the island, we did not want it to miss us. Sometimes the Beast Men came and danced by the light of the bonfire. “A regular corroboree,” Montgomery called it.

“Catherine,” he called, after the fire was lit. I could see him standing in the enclosure, with the full moon behind him, larger than it ever is in England. “Come to the dance. There’s a regular crowd of them tonight.”

“Not tonight,” she answered. “Tonight I wish to speak with Edward.”

“Damn Edward. Come on, Catherine.” I realized that he had already started drinking, or perhaps had never stopped.

I did not hear her answer, but he shouted, “All right then, damn you!” And then I heard the gate crash shut.

“He’s gone,” she said a moment later, standing in my doorway.

“What did you want to speak to me about?”

She came closer. She had a smell about her, not unpleasant but particularly, I thought, feline.

“Do you think he had a purpose for me?”

“Who?”

“Moreau. You can see that I’m made—differently from the others. My hands—he must have taken particular care.”

Her hands were on my shoulders. I could feel her claws through my shirt.

“Am I not well made, Edward?”

I looked down into her eyes, dark in the darkness. I don’t know what possessed me. “You are—divinely made.”

Where my shirt was open, she licked my chest, then my neck. She was almost as tall as I was. I could not help remembering Moreau’s neck, torn open.

He had done his work well. Standing on an English hillside, watching her with her veil blown back by the wind, I shuddered at the memory of her brown thighs, with a down on them softer than the hair of any woman.

She smiled at me, and despite my sweater and mackintosh, I felt cold.

We were lying together in a tangle of sheets when we heard the shot.

“Get your gun,” she said.

We ran out, me in my trousers, she in Montgomery’s shirt. As we passed the storeroom, she disappeared suddenly, then reappeared with an ammunition belt over her shoulder.

On the beach, around the bonfire, Beast Men were dancing. There was a throb in the air, and after a moment I realized that it was a drum. Someone—it looked like the Sayer of the Law—was keeping time while the Beast Men turned and leaped and shook their hands in the air, and shouted each in his own way—some like the grunting of a pig, some like the barking of a dog, one caterwauling. I will never forget that sight, watching from the shadowed dunes while the Beast Men capered together and the Puma Woman stood, with her gun in her hand, the ammunition belt slung over her shoulder, at my side.

“The fire is larger tonight,” she said. “What are they burning?”

I looked again, more carefully. “The boats!” They had not been large enough to carry us away from the island, but they had at least been tangible signs that escape was possible.

Without thinking, I ran among them. “Damn you to hell! Damn you all to hell! What beast among you—”

One of the Beast Men turned toward me. I started back with a cry. He was wearing a mask that made him look like a gorilla. But the eyes behind it were Montgomery’s. The other Beast Men stopped, stumbling into one another in confusion.

“What the hell—”

“I’m the—the Gorilla Man. See?” He began to caper about, with the stooping gate, the hanging arms, of a gorilla.

The other Beast Men laughed. I could see the firelight on their teeth.

“Drunk! You’re all drunk! It’s disgusting—”

“Come on, old stick-in-the-mud Prendick. Old hypocrite Prendick. Having your fun with the Cat. I deserve some fun too, don’t you think?”

“Come on, Montgomery,” I said. I tried to grab him, but he swung at me, punching me in the mouth. He could have hit harder had he not lost his balance, but I tasted blood. And then I saw a gleaming pair of eyes, and then another, staring at me. The Wolf-Bear was there, as was the Hyena-Swine, and with the instinctive reaction of a predator, the Hyena-Swine leaped at me.

I heard a crack. The Hyena-Swine fell at my feet. Then another crack, and another, and more Beast Men fell. They began screaming, running toward the darkness of the jungle. I thought I would be deafened by the cacophony or crushed as they ran. But the last of them vanished into the jungle, and suddenly there was silence. I was still standing, alone. At my feet lay the body of the Hyena-Swine. Beyond him lay M’Ling, a Wolf Woman, one of the Pig Men, and the Gorilla Man, Montgomery.

“You killed him,” I said.

“He became one of them,” she said, out of the darkness.

I did not answer. Silently, I turned, intending to walk back to the enclosure. It was a mass of flames. I heard a scream that I thought might come from one of the Beast Men, until I realized that I was the one screaming. For the second time that night, I began to run.

We saved nothing. There was nothing left to save. We had lost our supplies, and worse, we had lost the rest of our bullets. After the ones that Catherine had taken ran out, our guns would be useless.

“One of us must have overturned the lamp,” she said. She was, as always, perfectly calm. The only evidence I had seen of her anger had been Moreau’s throat, or what was left of it.

What could I say to her? If I had overturned the lamp, it had been by accident. But she, so agile—could she have done it deliberately? I hated her then, more than I had hated Moreau. If I thought I could have, I would have killed her. But I did not want to die Moreau’s death, to be buried, or worse, on that island of beasts that looked like men.

When I remember it now, I realize that I must have overturned the lamp. Montgomery had burned the boats to revenge himself upon me, but she had no use for revenge. Her motives were always simple, logical. What she wanted, she obtained directly, not with human indirection. Although she looked and laughed at me like an English lady, she still thought with the mind of a beast.

And so began the longer part of our stay on the island. Montgomery’s body we burned, but the other bodies… She was a predator, and slowly, unwillingly, I fell in with her ways. We hunted together, and with practice my vision became keener, although never, of course, equal to hers. I insisted on cooking our food, although she laughed at me. I would not watch her when she ate it fresh from the kill. We drank from the stream, sucking the water up. Our clothes grew ragged and hung on our brown hides. I lay with her in the cave we called our home, hating her, hating what I had become, but unable to leave her. Even now, I remember her touch, the rasp of her tongue on my skin, the gold of her eyes as she stared down at me and said, “What are you thinking, Ape Man?”

“Don’t call me that!”

She would laugh and push her nose against me like a cat that wants to be stroked, and make a sound in her throat that was neither a purr nor a growl.

One day, I was walking along the beach, scavenging what I could, crabs, clams, seaweed. We were using our bullets judiciously, but they were beginning to run out. Soon we would be reduced to hunting like beasts. I would become like her. I saw something floating toward me. A sail! But the boat reeled, like a drunken sailor. It was the boat I have described in my book, with the captain and the first mate of the Ipecacuanha sitting aboard, dead. This might be my only chance to escape the island. If I died on the ocean, at least I died as a man.

I stepped into the boat. I was certain, then, that I would never see her again.

“Perhaps,” she said, “you would like to know in what way you can help me.”

A light rain had begun. Her veil caught drops of moisture, like a spider’s web.

I turned away. I did not want to know, and yet I could not stop listening. As a scientist, and a man, I wanted to know what she intended.

“I would have liked to bear children myself. But I cannot. You and I proved that, did we not, Edward? Would you have liked that, to have had children with me? What would they have been like, I wonder? Moreau took away my ability to breed with my kind, and could not give me the ability to breed with yours. Even Dr. Radzinsky was not able to give me that, although he tried. Somewhere, there is an incompatibility that goes beyond the anatomical. Perhaps someday your scientists will find it, and then we will be able to create a true race of Beast Men. But I am impatient. I want my children to flourish and populate the earth. Surely a natural desire, according to Mr. Darwin.

“Here, in England, I will create a clinic, to revive and perfect Moreau’s research. But my clinic will be no House of Pain. We will incorporate all the technological advances of the last decade—and the educational advances, since my clinic will also be a school. Think, Edward! My children will be educated along the latest scientific lines. Educated to be the inheritors of a new age.”

“What makes you think that I would finance such a—such a mad scheme? Is it not enough that Moreau did it once? Why would you wish to create such abominations yourself?”

“Not abominations. Look at me, Edward. Am I an abomination?”

I did not know how to answer.

“You will finance my mad scheme, as you call it, for three reasons. First, because you are a gentleman, and a gentleman cares about his reputation. If you do not provide me with the financing I require, I will inform your English press. There are two laws, Edward, that all civilized men obey: not to lie with their mothers or sisters or daughters, and not to eat the flesh of other men. You have broken the second of those laws.”

“Why should I care what the public thinks of me?”

“Because there will be inquiries. And because nothing will be proven, people will think the worst. You will become notorious. Wherever you go, people will follow you, to interview you, to take photographs. Imagine the newspapers! ‘What Mr. Prendick the cannibal had for breakfast. How it compares with human flesh.’ But second, you are a scientist. What I am proposing is an experiment. I will bring pumas from the Americas, young ones, less than two years old. Fine, healthy specimens. I will operate on them in stages, changing them gradually. Allowing them, at each stage, to become accustomed to their new forms. Educating them. There will be no pain. There will be no deformity. My children will be as beautiful as I am.”

I grasped at straws. “Your plan is impossible. You will never be able to build a clinic like that in England. Where would you hide? There is no part of the countryside that is uninhabited, no place obscure enough that your work won’t be observed. You will be found out.”

She laughed. “I do not propose to put my clinic in the countryside. No, my clinic will be in the heart of England, in London itself.”

“But surely the police—”

“There are parts of London where the police never go. Parts where the inhabitants speak a babble of language, and everything you want to purchase is to be had, from a girl fresh from the English countryside to a pipe of opium that will give you distinctly un-English dreams. I have become familiar with them over the last few years. Do not worry about the practicalities. Those I have thought of already.”

“And third—I did tell you there are three reasons—you are a follower of Mr. Darwin. Consider, Edward.” She turned again to look at the valley below. “The operation of natural selection is necessary for evolution. Without selective pressure, a species stagnates, perhaps even degenerates, reverting to atavistic forms. How long has it been since selective pressure operated on the human species? You have killed all your predators. How many men are killed by wolves or bears, in Europe? You care for your poor, your sick, your idiots, your mad, who give birth to more of their kind, filling your cities. Your intelligent classes, who spend so much of their energy in their work, do not breed. This is not new to you, I know. You have read it in Nordau, Lombroso. Your very strength and compassion as a species will be your undoing. You will grow weaker by the year, the decade, the century. Eventually, like the dodo, you will become extinct. That is the fate of mankind. Unless…”

“Unless what?”

“You once again introduce a predator. That is what I’m offering you, Edward. Selective predation. A species that I create, to feed off the weakest among you, to make humanity strong.”

She was mad, I thought. And I think so still. But there is a kind of reason in madness. Moreau had it, and as she claimed, she was Moreau’s daughter. He too had the directness, the simplicity, of a beast.

I have not seen her since that day on the hillside. The money I send her is deposited into a bank account, and where it goes from there, I do not know. Do I believe that the creatures she creates will strengthen rather than weaken mankind? I do not know, but she has never lied to me. It takes a man to do that.

There was a fourth reason that she did not mention. Perhaps it was kindness on her part not to mention it. But I do not think that, in all her interactions with men, she has learned kindness. Surely she must have known. Sometimes at night I still think of her, her fingers twining in my hair, her legs tangled in mine, her lips close, so close, to my throat. I do not think I loved her. But it was a madness that resembled love, and perhaps I am still mad, because I have not refused her. She must have known, because as she stood in the doorway, ready to depart, as respectable as any English lady, she stepped close to me and licked my neck. I felt the rasp of her tongue.

“Goodbye, Edward,” she said. “When I am ready, not before, I will invite you to my clinic, and you can see the first of our children. Yours and mine.”

Yesterday, in the post, I received her invitation. Will I go? I have not decided. But I am a scientist, cursed with curiosity. I would like to see what she creates and whether she is, indeed, a worthy successor to Moreau.

Ellen Datlow has been editing short science fiction, fantasy, and horror for almost thirty years. She was co-editor of The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror for twenty-one years and currently edits The Best Horror of the Year. She has edited or co-edited many other anthologies, most recently The Coyote Road and Troll’s Eye View (with Terri Windling), Inferno, Poe: 19 New Tales Inspired by Edgar Allan Poe, Lovecraft Unbound, Digital Domains: A Decade of Science Fiction and Fantasy, and Darkness: Two Decades of Modern Horror.

Forthcoming are Naked City: New Tales of Urban Fantasy, The Best Horror of the Year Volume Two, Haunted Legends (with Nick Mamatas), The Beastly Bride, and Teeth (the latter two with Terri Windling).

She has won multiple awards for her editing, including the World Fantasy, Locus, Hugo, International Horror Guild, Shirley Jackson, and Stoker Awards. She was named recipient of the 2007 Karl Edward Wagner Award for “outstanding contribution to the genre.”

For more information, visit her website at www.datlow.com

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