Things Beyond Midnight (16 page)

At fifteen, in high school, Fred trapped the janitor’s Tabby in the gymnasium locker room, choked it to death, and carried it downstairs to the furnace. He was severely scratched in the process.

As a college freshman, Fred distributed several pieces of poisoned fish over the Rockhurst campus. The grotesquely twisted bodies of seven cats were found the next morning.

Working in the sales department of Hall Brothers, Fred was invited to visit his supervisor at home one Saturday—and was seen in the yard playing with Frances, a pet Siamese. She was later found crushed to death, and it was assumed a car had run over the animal. Fred quit his job ten days later because his supervisor had cat hands.

Fred married Louise Ferber when he was thirty, and she wanted to have children right away Fred said no, that babies were small and furry in their blankets, and disturbed him. Louise bought herself a small kitten for company while Fred was on the road. He didn’t object—but a week after the purchase, he took a meat knife from the kitchen and dismembered the kitten, telling his wife that it had “wandered away.” Then he bought her a green parakeet.

ZZZZZZZ Click

This is Frederick Baxter speaking and I... wait, the sound level is wrong and I’ll—There, it’s all right now. I can’t tell anyone about this—but today I found an old Tom in an alley downtown, and I got hold of the stinking, wretched animal and I—

ZZZZZZZ Click

The heart trouble started when Fred was thirty-five.

“You have an unusual condition,” the doctor told him. “Tour chest houses a quivering-muscled heart—fibrillation. This condition
can
prove fatal. Preventive measures must be taken. No severe exercise, no overeating, plenty of rest.”

Fred obeyed the man’s orders—although he did not really trust a doctor whose cat eyes reflected the moon.

ZZZZZZZ Click

... awful time with the heart. Really awful. The use of digitalis drives me to alcohol, which sends my heart into massive flutters. Then the alcohol forces me into a need for more digitalis. It is a deadly circle and I...

I have black dreams. A nap at noon and I dream of smothering. This comes from the heart condition. And because of the cats. They all fear me now, avoid me on the street. They’ve
told
one another about me. This is fact. Killing them is becoming quite difficult... but I caught a big, evil one in the garden last Thursday and buried it. Alive. As I am buried alive in these black dreams of mine. I got excited, burying the cat —and this is bad for me. I must go on killing them, but I must
not
get excited. I must stay calm and not—here comes Louise so I’d better...

ZZZZZZZ Click

“What’s wrong, Fred?”

It was 2 a.m. and she had awakened to find him standing at the window.

“Something in the yard,” he said.

The moon was flushing the grass with pale gold—and a dark shape scuttled over the lawn, breaking the pattern. A cat shape.

“Go to sleep,” said his wife, settling into her pillow.

Fred Baxter stared at the cat, who stared back at him from the damp yard, its head raised, the yellow of the night moon now brimming the creature’s eyes. The cat’s mouth opened.

“It’s sucking up the moonlight,” Fred whispered.

Then he went back to bed.

But he did not sleep.

Later, thinking about this, Fred recalled what his mother had often said about cats. “They perch on the chest of a baby,” she’d said, “place their red jaws over the soft mouth of the baby, and draw all the life from its body. I won’t have one of these disgusting things in the house.”

Alone in the summer night, walking down Gillham Avenue, Fred passes a parked car, bulking black and silent in its gravel driveway. The closed car windows gleam deep yellow from the eyes inside.

Eyes
?

Fred stops, looks back at the car.

It is packed with cats.

How many? Ten... a dozen, More... twenty; maybe. All inside the car; staring out at me. Dozens of foul slitted yellow eyes.

Fred can do nothing. He checks all four doors of the silent automobile, finds them locked. The cats stare at him.

Filthy creatures!

He moves on.

The street is oddly silent. Fred realizes why: the crickets have stopped. No breeze stirs the trees; they hang over him, heavy and motionless in the summer dark.

The houses dong Gillham are shuttered, lightless, closed against the night. Yet, on a porch, Fred detects movement.

Yellow eyes spark from porch blackness. A big, dark-furred cat is curled into a wooden swing. It regards Fred Baxter.

Kill it!

He moves with purposeful stealth, leans to grasp a stout tree limb which has fallen into the yard. He mounts the porch steps.

The dark-furred cat has not stirred.

Fred raises the heavy limb. The cat hisses, claws extended, fangs hatefully revealed. It cries out like a wounded child and vanishes off the porch into the deep shadow between houses.

Missed. Missed the rotten thing.

Fred moves down the steps, crosses the yard towards the walk. His head is lowered in anger. When he looks up, the walk is thick with cats. He runs into them, kicking, flailing the tree club. They scatter, melting away from him like butter from a heated blade.

Thud thud thud. Fred drops the club. His heart is rapping, fisting his chest. He leans against a tree, sobbing for breath. The yellow-eyed cats watch him from the street, from bushes, from steps and porches and the tops of cars.

Didn’t get a one of them. Not a damn one
...

The fireflies have disappeared. The street lamps have dimmed to smoked circles above the heavy, cloaking trees. The clean summer sky is shut away from him—and Fred Baxter finds the air clogged with the sharp, suffocating smell of cat fur.

He walks on down the block.

The cats follow him.

He thinks of what fire could do to them—long blades of yellow crisping flame to flake them away into dark ash. But he cannot burn them; burning them would be impossible. There are
hundreds.
That many at least.

They fill driveways, cover porches, blanket yards, pad in lion-like silence along the street. The yellow moon is in their eyes, sucked from the sky: Fred, his terror rising, raises his head to look upward.

The trees are alive with them!

His throat closes. He cannot swallow. Cat fur cloaks his mouth. Fred begins to run down the concrete sidewalk, stumbling, weaving, his chest filled with a terrible winged beating.

A sound.

The scream of the cats.

Fred claps both hands to his head to muffle the stab and thrust of sound.

The house... must reach the house.

Fred staggers forward. The cat masses surge in behind him as he runs up the stone walk to his house.

A cat lands on his neck. Mutely, he flings it loose—plunges up the wooden porch steps.

Key. Find your key and unlock the door. Get inside!

Too late.

Eyes blazing, the cats flow up and over him, a dark, furry, stifling weight. As he pulls back the screen, claws and needle teeth rip at his back, arms, face, legs... shred his clothing and skin. He twists wildly, beating at them. Blood runs into his eyes...

The door is open. He falls forward, through the opening. The cats swarm after him in hot waves, covering his chest, sucking the breath from his body. His thin scream is lost in the sharp, rising, all-engulfing cry of the cats.

Louise found him two days later, lying face down on the living-room floor. His clothes were wrinkled, but untorn.

A cat was licking the cold, white, unmarked skin of Frederick Baxter’s cheek.