The Second Cat Megapack. George Zebrowski
prayers, and that they had painted on the sides of their wagons strange figures with human bodies and the heads of cats, hawks, rams and lions. And the leader of the caravan wore a headdress with two horns and a curious disk betwixt the horns.
There was in this singular caravan a little boy with no father or mother, but only a tiny black kitten to cherish. The plague had not been kind to him, yet had left him this small furry thing to mitigate his sorrow; and when one is very young, one can find great relief in the lively antics of a black kitten. So the boy whom the dark people called Menes smiled more often than he wept as he sat playing with his graceful kitten on the steps of an oddly painted wagon.
On the third morning of the wanderers’ stay in Ulthar, Menes could not find his kitten; and as he sobbed aloud in the market-place certain villagers told him of the old man and his wife, and of sounds heard in the night. And when he heard these things his sobbing gave place to meditation, and finally to prayer. He stretched out his arms toward the sun and prayed in a tongue no villager could understand; though indeed the villagers did not try very hard to understand, since their attention was mostly taken up by the sky and the odd shapes the clouds were assuming. It was very peculiar, but as the little boy uttered his petition there seemed to form overhead the shadowy, nebulous figures of exotic things; of hybrid creatures crowned with horn-flanked disks. Nature is full of such illusions to impress the imaginative.
That night the wanderers left Ulthar, and were never seen again. And the householders were troubled when they noticed that in all the village there was not a cat to be found. From each hearth the familiar cat had vanished; cats large and small, black, grey, striped, yellow and white. Old Kranon, the burgomaster, swore that the dark folk had taken the cats away in revenge for the killing of Menes’ kitten; and cursed the caravan and the little boy. But Nith, the lean notary, declared that the old cotter and his wife were more likely persons to suspect; for their hatred of cats was notorious and increasingly bold. Still, no one durst complain to the sinister couple; even when little Atal, the innkeeper’s son, vowed that he had at twilight seen all the cats of Ulthar in that accursed yard under the trees, pacing very slowly and solemnly in a circle around the cottage, two abreast, as if in performance of some unheard-of rite of beasts. The villagers did not know how much to believe from so small a boy; and though they feared that the evil pair had charmed the cats to their death, they preferred not to chide the old cotter till they met him outside his dark and repellent yard.
So Ulthar went to sleep in vain anger; and when the people awakened at dawn—behold! every cat was back at his accustomed hearth! Large and small, black, grey, striped, yellow and white, none was missing. Very sleek and fat did the cats appear, and sonorous with purring content. The citizens talked with one another of the affair, and marveled not a little. Old Kranon again insisted that it was the dark folk who had taken them, since cats did not return alive from the cottage of the ancient man and his wife. But all agreed on one thing: that the refusal of all the cats to eat their portions of meat or drink their saucers of milk was exceedingly curious. And for two whole days the sleek, lazy cats of Ulthar would touch no food, but only doze by the fire or in the sun.
It was fully a week before the villagers noticed that no lights were appearing at dusk in the windows of the cottage under the trees. Then the lean Nith remarked that no one had seen the old man or his wife since the night the cats were away. In another week the burgomaster decided to overcome his fears and call at the strangely silent dwelling as a matter of duty, though in so doing he was careful to take with him Shang the blacksmith and Thul the cutter of stone as witnesses. And when they had broken down the frail door they found only this: two cleanly picked human skeletons on the earthen floor, and a number of singular beetles crawling in the shadowy corners.
There was subsequently much talk among the burgesses of Ulthar. Zath, the coroner, disputed at length with Nith, the lean notary; and Kranon and Shang and Thul were overwhelmed with questions. Even little Atal, the innkeeper’s son, was closely questioned and given a sweetmeat as reward. They talked of the old cotter and his wife, of the caravan of dark wanderers, of small Menes and his black kitten, of the prayer of Menes and of the sky during that prayer, of the doings of the cats on the night the caravan left, and of what was later found in the cottage under the dark trees in the repellent yard.
And in the end the burgesses passed that remarkable law which is told of by traders in Hatheg and discussed by travelers in Nir; namely, that in Ulthar no man may kill a cat.
THE CAT WITH THE TULIP FACE, by A. R. Morlan
Author’s Note: This novelette is a prequel to my novel The Amulet, and takes place in late 1986, a year before the events in the novel.
* * * *
“When it’s time to die, let us not discover that we have never lived.”
—Henry David Thoreau
Meaow.
“Kitty-kitty?” Arlene asked the humid early morning air, as she glanced up and down Wisconsin Street. Darkness welled in recessed shop doorways, and gave an inky sheen to the large display windows. The greenish-white street lamps were too far away to cast much of a glow where she stood, midway between the tacky novelty shop and the building which used to be the Ewerton Savings and Loan but was now a lawyer’s office (after the Century 21 Realty office came and went).
A fine mist settled on Arlene’s exposed face and forearms; she rolled down the plastic backed canvas sleeves on her outsized slicker and tried calling again. “C’mon, Kitty-kitty. It’s okay, I won’t hurt you.” She could hear the cat (kitten? It sounded young) crying, but the humidity in the sluggish July air made it difficult to pinpoint just where its cries originated.
Meeeaow!
Closer and louder now. Arlene walked forward slowly, heading toward the tiny diner that used-to-be-a-clothing-boutique to the north of her. In the distance she heard a truck’s many wide tires snick-splash along one of the side streets behind her. At this hour of the morning—just before four—the only things moving on the streets of Ewerton were out of state truckers, the last stragglers coming home after an all-night party held in one of those walk-up apartments nestled above the department stores, the occasional stray animal—and Arlene.
Plastic mesh shopping bags in hand, Arlene had Ewerton all to herself in the mornings. She was the Queen of Ewerton Avenue, the Owner of Wisconsin Street. And the Duchess of the Dumpsters, she often joked with herself as she leaned into the back-of-the-store Dumpsters, her fingers sensitive to the feel of aluminum cans, the odd piece of discarded merchandise, or even the past-its-due-date box or carton of food.
And stray animals. Often, she’d unintentionally scare a wild cat or something smaller and quicker that she wasn’t about to try to scrutinize in order to determine its species. And some mornings, she had footsore canine company for the length of a few blocks, until a slobbery tongue touched her hand in farewell and the empty streets rang with the sound of dog nails doing a chitinous tap-dance on the concrete.
But these had been animals, hungry, tired, or just plain lonely enough to allow Arlene to pick them up and scavenge them like an aluminum can, or an old box of breakfast cereal. Not that she thought of her pets as refuse, or cast-offs, though. Arlene treated all of her “finds” with respect, be they inanimate or animate. The aluminum cans were washed, then carefully crushed flat, prior to their storage in black plastic bags in the basement (and their subsequent return to the recycling truck come Thursday). The rust-dotted kitchen tools, chipped dishes, and one-left cards of kitchen magnets or corn-on-the-cob servers were diligently scrubbed, mended or matched with other odd-lot items waiting in Arlene’s already cluttered kitchen drawers.
As for the animals…Arlene was a couple years short of being able to collect her own Social Security, but what with her late husband’s SS checks, and the modest sum he’d left in the bank for her, she had just enough to pay her utility bills plus her considerable veterinarian bills. If a cat or dog needed food, she bought it name brands plus those expensive treats in the fancy little cans or boxes, while she ate weeks-old spareribs from the IGA dumpster. Should the animal need flea shampoo, she used only a half a tablet of denture cleaner in her chopper-hopper each day. When she wrote out the checks for her animals’ shots each year,