Cat Tales (8 page)

“If I come round there, I'm going to be late again, and Chan'll have my guts!”

“You're a mean son-of-a-bitch!” she tells me. And then she hangs up.

I didn't see or hear from her the whole day.

The
next
morning at nine-thirty?

Yep, you guessed it.

“Pleeease!”

So I get round there. Megan's pretty shaken-up, all trembly, by this time. And yes, her curtains are shredded up pretty badly. So I try to think this through.

“Cats usually leave a smell,” I tell her. “But there isn't one. Can you find any fur?”

We looked, and didn't.

“You could try, like, sprinkling talcum powder on the floor, seeing if it leaves any paw marks?”

But she's too freaked to get her head round anything sensible right now, and she keeps clinging on to me, and this time we do end up making out, at ten-fifteen in the morning. Just call that striking a blow for the ordinary working man.

Some time mid-afternoon, Megan shows up in the store and says, “I want some books on ghosts.”

“Say what?”

“It's a ghost-cat. It's the only thing it can be. And I want a book on exorcisms too.”

“Don't priests do that?”

“God, Lenny. You know I'm not religious.”

So she ends up buying three volumes, using my discount. And when she's gone, Chan Park, the store's joint-owner, comes sauntering across to me with the usual supercilious look on his face.

Now, Chan's a pretty stylish-looking dude, always dressed in leather, with a little moustache and goatee beard that I have to admit look pretty cool on a Korean. And he's very smart, and reads a lot of heavy non-fiction stuff. But he does have airs and graces. Yeah right, like he thinks nobody knows he drops so many E's at the weekend he'd end up humping Genghis Khan if Genghis Khan smiled at him nicely.

“So, Leonard,” he says. “It seems your barely legal girlfriend has wigged out completely.”

Which is designed to annoy me and does, since he's always making snide remarks about Megan's age. But I don't respond. In the first place, I'm already in the dog-house for the second late-show in a week. And in the second, I have this theory by now, and maybe Chan's the right person to try it out on.

I explain what's been going on, and he keeps looking at me like I'm on something.

“Do you agree with her, about the ghost stuff?”

“No, man. She's a Goth, and Goths believe in that shit. What I think, see, is that there's this kind of alternate world, just like ours but different, and —"

“Leonard?” Chan just snaps. “Would you spare me all the Star Trek bullshit? Yes, okay I'll admit, quantum theory does point to the probability of separate planes of existence. But they're kept apart, quite strongly I'd imagine. I'd suggest it would take the force of something like a black hole to break through. And do you think a fucking cat would go to all that trouble just to shred your little girlfriend's curtains?”

I had to admit that didn't sound too likely.

“But I'll tell you what it might be, though.”

And he's gone ever so slightly smirky now, so that I can't tell whether he's jerking my chain or not.

But he starts to tell me all about this dude called Professor Stephen Hawking. I think I saw him on the tv once — he's the guy who talks funny, right? And apparently, this guy has figured out how much the entire galaxy weighs —

“How did he do
that?
I mean, that's
impossible!”

Chan rolls his eyeballs up before continuing.

And has realised that there isn't enough mass — I think I've got this right — to create enough gravity to hold the whole fuck-wad together. So he gets this idea that there might be other stuff out there called Dark Matter, which we can't see or touch. And there are other scientists who are looking for it now, and some of them even think they've found some.

I almost burst in with
how?
again, but my head's throbbing a little and I'm waiting for Chan to get to the point.

“Think about this.” And he's grinning openly by now. “If there is Dark Matter, why should it just be like dust, floating in space? I'm made of matter. So are you. So's that delivery you haven't unpacked yet.”

“I guess so."

“And so, why shouldn't Dark Matter form real, even living objects? Like cats?”

And he walks off grinning like he's just made out with Brad Pitt
and
Brad Pitt's cloned twin brother.

I was pretty sure that he
was
mostly yanking my chain. But knowing Chan and the way he likes to air his knowledge, I was also pretty sure that that Dark Matter stuff was based in fact.

My head was still throbbing slightly by the time we closed up, and I thought about it all the way to Megan's. Matter that wasn't there, but was? Nonexistent stuff that some egg-head could prove did exist? Wow, the world just kept on getting weirder, and science wasn't exactly helping matters any.

When Megan opened the door, there were, like, a hundred thousand candles lit up all behind her. And she was clutching a bible which she'd borrowed from the Baptist spinster two floors down.

“I am
never
going to get her off my back now,” Megan complained. “She kept asking if I want to go to church.”

Anyway, the whole point was — as you've probably guessed — she was about to perform an exorcism, and was waiting for yours truly to join in. I tried explaining to her about Dark Matter, but she didn't buy it, not a bit.

“Weighed the
galaxy?”
she kept on saying. “That's such total bullshit!”

So we did the whole Rod Steiger bit. No one's head span around. No one chucked. Nothing at all happened, except I practically set fire to my pants when I stepped backwards into a row of candles. But at the end of it, Megan had a strange, satisfied look on her face, calm like. “It's gone,” she told me. “I can feel things like that.”

Like I keep on pointing out, she
is
a Goth.

I decided to do the noble, gentlemanly thing, though.

“Look, I'll stay over tonight, just to make sure everything's gone back to normal.”

“Sounds nice.”

And she starts rubbing up against me, so I have to push her back a little.

“No! You know what'll happen if we do that. I'll fall flat asleep afterwards. I have to stay, like, focussed.”

Typically of Megan, though, she doesn't let it go at that, and it doesn't take long before I succumb. But I force myself to get up straight away when we're done, since I have a duty to perform tonight. Think tough. Think steely. Think Clint Eastwood in that movie where he's protecting the President, ‘The Bodyguard'. Shit, no, that's Kevin Costner.

“Coffee, wench,” I command Megan.

And she honestly doesn't mind. She's got this special glow about her now.

“Are you really going to stay up all night?”

“I hope so, just to make sure. Have you got some ups?”

Of course she did. It's the way Goth chicks stay so thin.

Anyway, there I am at four in the morning, sitting at the foot of Megan's bed. And Megan's snoring really loudly — Jesus! And my eyelids are starting to get heavy, and I don't really want to take
another
up — I, you know, have my health to think of. So I force myself. Show true grit. Real, rigid determination.

‘In The Line of Fire,'
that's
the one.

And guess what, I did it. Stayed awake the whole way through till dawn. You didn't think I had it in me, did you?

So the daylight starts shining through Megan's thin, shredded curtains.

And there are huge parallel scratches on the plaster of the wall beneath them.

Megan goes berserk when she wakes up.

“You fell asleep! For God's sake!”

“No I didn't.”

“You must have done!”

But I know what the truth is. And I'm realising something else as well. Not just that I didn't see anything. There wasn't a sound. And you'd have heard a scritching as the claws went down the plaster, at the very least.

So I keep thinking . . . Dark Matter! Stuff that actually exists, but isn't there.

And the next thing, there's this awful noise from out back. Megan and I both rush to the kitchen window, just in time to see a gruesome sight.

The downstairs window of the block behind is open. And through it, we can see the old lady who owns Mr. Paws. Or
thought
she did. Because Mr. Paws is all over her face, scratching and yowling. And she's screaming her head off.

After a few seconds of this, Mr. Paws lets go and and jumps out through the window, where he prowls around the little courtyard, his back arched, all snarly.

And this from a cat who wouldn't move a muscle if you stuck a knife up its fat ass.

“What's got
into
him?” Megan asks, her voice extremely quivery now.

“I don't know.”

An ambulance came after a while. And then a couple of guys with long thick gloves, who still had a hell of a time getting Mr. Paws into a basket.

After that, everything just calmed down flat to normal. Megan was still somewhat freaked, but if I was late for work again I knew that Chan would fire me.

I thought about it all day, though. And this is what I half-way figured. Look, it must be cool in some ways being a Dark Matter cat. You can move about and do stuff without anyone being able to stop you. Hell, if I was a Dark Matter Leonard Melnic —

Well, you get the picture.

But it must get pretty boring after a while. Like, wouldn't it be better to have an actual real body and be able to do realer stuff?

Where did the body come from though? Could Dark Matter and . . . er . . . Mattery Matter exist in the same place?

Mr. Paws?

And the way that he behaved? Well, it seemed to make sense that Dark Matter creatures would have a dark nature.

I didn't go back to Megan's that evening, because the idea freaked me out too much.

But at eight
P.M.
, the phone goes.

“
T
HERE'S SOMEONE in here!”

“The cat?”

“No, a person! I can't see her! But she's in the bathroom, moving stuff around!”

“Fuck Megan, just get
out
of there, right now!”

I only begin wondering why Meg called the intruder ‘she' after I've put the phone down. Since . . . she couldn't see who it was, and intruders are usually ‘he'.

Maybe she sensed something.

As I said at the beginning of this, it is ten minutes to Megan's. More like five if you're moving fast.

Twenty fucking minutes passed before I saw her shadowy figure coming down the street. Twenty Godalmighty friggit minutes during which I paced and clenched and almost went insane.

So I throw open my window, and I'm about to ask her where she's been, when I see that there's a big bag thrown over her shoulder.

“You
packed?”

She looks up at me, but I can't see her features.

“I've got some expensive stuff! I'm not insured, you know!”

“You fucking
packed,
with an intruder in your place?”

“Don't talk to me like that! I'm coming up!”

About half a minute later, I can hear her footsteps coming up the stairs, and I'm reaching for my door-knob — AND I'M STILL THERE now, with my hand halfway towards it, but not moving.

Megan's banging on the door, and saying the same things over and over. They started out whiney-bewildered, and then whiney-frightened. Now she's sounding whiney-cross.

“Lenn-iieee? Please! Let me in! Lenny, what are you
doing?”

I'm not listening to the words any more. Just to the tone of her voice. Trying to detect something.

What?

Like . . . sly. Deceptive.

Something . . . just not right.

You see, I may not be any Professor Stephen Hawking, but I've figured out one thing for myself.

If there really are such things as non-existent cats, then a lot of them, without a doubt, have non-existent owners.

Tony Richards tells us that he's never kept pets him-
self — “I'm just away from home too much. But the
cats of neighbours have always played a large part of
my life down the years, all those Smokies, Snoopies,
and Misties coming nosing around my place to see
what I'm up to. Curiosity killed the cat? The ones
who live near me seem to thrive on it. It's that quality, plus their energy and occasional capacity of mischief, that was part of the inspiration for this story.”

ANGELIQUE'S

by Sandra Beswetherick

B
EN STOOD in the graveled lot of the roadside café, unbelieving. Gone were the window boxes overflowing with petunias and geraniums, gone the bright, freshly-painted look of the building.