Felidae on the Road - Special U.S. Edition (6 page)

Following
a time-honoured custom of the days when I woke happy, I did finally summon up the courage to shoot a claw out of the fold of skin covering the pad of my right forepaw. Gradually all the rest of my claws came out like miniature flick-knives. My wet body was overcome by a violent fit of shaking which sprayed water everywhere, and before any further tricks to get me up to starting temperature could ensue I pulled myself together and jumped up. Pains shot through my guts like demons unleashed. I held my breath, because the torment threatened to overcome me in short order. The injuries every fibre of my body had suffered throbbed and hammered so horribly that I yelled out loud. But I'd been fortunate in my misfortune. So far as I could tell from a few experimental stretches - which were painful but bearable - I didn't seem to have broken anything, and the bruises from all that bumping about weren't really too bad either. In short, I rearranged my bones and sinews and offered thanks to the Great Reaper, who seemed to have turned a blind eye my way again.

The thing now was to get away from this filthy place of perdition as quickly as possible. Slowly, and somewhat handicapped by a numbing crick in my neck, I raised my head and looked up at the infernal chasm above, my way down to the underworld. The open manhole showed the heavens with ominous, towering clouds still driving across them. But occasionally patches of blue morning sky broke the darkness, allowing dim light to fall into the shaft. However, this faint light didn't seem to promise a happy ending, more like the exact opposite. Because now I could see that the iron rungs were too far apart for me to use them to work my way up. Even if I stood on my back legs on one rung, which I couldn't anyway, for reasons of balance, my body wouldn't stretch far enough to reach the next rung above. It looked as if I had no choice but to wander around this crypt until I found some other way out. Perhaps I'd thanked the Great Reaper too soon: OK, so the fall hadn't killed me, but it was to be feared that the smell of sewage, which was getting more and more penetrating as my pain subsided, would make a thorough job of it before too long.

I turned round, and had another surprise. By now my eyes had accustomed themselves to the poor light, and I could take in every aspect of the dubious charms of my present location. It looked as if I was on the bank of a canal about three metres broad, of unknown length, a picturesque river of piss and shit bounded by an ancient, curving wall which threw back the quirky reflections of the sludge as it quietly flowed past. It was difficult to make out where this sewer began and where it ended, for the cold light falling through the shaft cast a dull glow only over my immediate surroundings. The quay on which I stood, with its rusty hand-rail, was in fact a niche; the sewage workers would climb down to this point before setting off through the tunnels. There was a walkway about a metre wide, also made of stone, on both sides of the sewer. I had no idea where this path would lead me, but it would be rotten luck if I didn't come upon a link with the world of daylight somewhere along the way. After such a concentrated set of misfortunes, the law of averages said something nice must happen to me soon.

Although the nauseating smell and the musty, claustrophobic atmosphere of my cramped quarters didn't exactly suggest Venice, this gloomy spot had a certain morbidly romantic charm of its own. Before I'd honoured the bowels of the city with my radiant presence, the stormy floods must have caused one hell of a blockage there. Now that the tide had gone down, water-drops were falling from the roof of the tunnel into the sewer as if they were dripping from stalactites in a cave, echoing again and again, making some very odd noises. The pattern of the ripples reflected on the walls was the visual counterpart of the weird acoustics, and the constant quiet murmur of the main stream provided comforting background music, putting the finishing touch to the not unattractive picture of a grisly grotto. Partly to relish my relief at finding I was still all in one piece, partly because I suddenly felt fascinated by this kingdom of shadows, I stood on the edge of the stone path, legs planted wide apart, and took in the weird scene. Somehow the hypnotic lullaby of the never-ending, echoing drip-drip-drip and the peculiar atmosphere of this unlikely place soothed me, making me feel strangely peaceful. How idyllically this little river flowed along, what meditations it induced as one stood on the bank, letting one's eyes stray over the gentle waves. Look, there was even a swan swimming in the distance ...

Swan? Come off it, you didn't get swans in the sewage system. Crocodiles, maybe, but no swans. There really
was
something swimming in the sewer, though, something white drifting towards me, a bloated something that turned majestically round and round on its own axis. It emerged from the darkness as unexpectedly as a shining space ship emerging from the belly of the universe. At first it was only a tiny white dot, bobbing about in the pitch-black expanses of the water. It was only its whiteness that made me notice it. But the closer it came the more clearly I could make it out. Now that it was about twenty metres away it looked like a fluffy, puffed-up flour bag. My harmonious feelings of a moment ago began giving way to a vague sense of oppression that constricted my throat like an iron collar. I couldn't take my eyes off this uncanny buoy, especially as it was bobbing along straight towards me. After a while I could see that the apparition wasn't as bright a white as it had initially seemed: it was the corpse of an animal with milk-white fur which was now very dirty, and it had been in the water so long that it had swelled to twice its natural size and looked like a sodden cotton wool ball. So I was looking at a drowned body. And the nightmare showed it could get even worse. There were large wounds in the lifeless corpse, going deep into the victim's flesh and suggesting small bomb craters. There were too many of them to be counted; they had probably been caused by bites. Since the corpse was in an advanced state of decomposition, and there was no blood flowing from the wounds, which ranged from dark pink to violet in colour, I guessed that death must have occurred several days ago. Ergo, the deceased had begun his wanderings from some very distant part of the sewage system, probably right outside town, and had been floating endlessly in the labyrinth of the sewers ever since.

I'd been fearing another revelation for quite some time, and now it came. Moving elegantly, like an aquatic ballerina, a tail chopped off in the middle suddenly rose from the poor tortured body, and I recognised it as a member of my own species floating there like a grotesque lifebelt. Horror and panic exploded in me, as if defective blood vessels were bursting in my brain. Creepy speculation about what kind of maltreatment had changed one of my own kind from a clean-limbed athlete to a badly mutilated lump of flesh occupied my entire mind, and I forgot all about my own aches and pains. I expected to glean further information very soon, in particular on the corpse's breed, because it was making straight for the side of the stone walkway, so I'd be able to see its face as the body gently rotated.

However, the face turned out to be the most horrible sight of all. The corpse did indeed come closer, almost brushing against the walkway; it came so close I could practically touch it. And yes, it turned gracefully on its own axis like a drifting water-lily and showed its front view. Enough light fell on it to let me see everything clearly. But horror of horrors, there was nothing left to see! The body, resembling a cake which had risen beyond all expectations, had no head left at all. That valuable item had simply been torn off, and nothing now hung from the neck but blackened fringes of flesh like the leaves of plants dipping picturesquely into the water. The corpse went on turning, and I could see the full extent of what had been done to it. The battle must have been an unequal one from the start, something like the battle of David and Goliath but without the biblical result. Obviously the stronger contestant had never entertained any idea of doing his opponent a favour and carrying out the execution with a single merciful bite, in our old hunting tradition. The slaughter had been done with such hatred, or rather such perverse pleasure in inflicting pain, that the victor had bitten whole chunks out of the victim just for fun. Poor thing, he must have been suffering such pain and desperation that he didn't know how to defend himself. So then the monster went for the throat, digging his teeth right in and tearing so furiously that the head was finally severed from the backbone, hanging loose, attached to the body only like a lid on a rusty hinge. After that, for some mysterious reason or other, the murderer removed it altogether and somehow managed to tip the lifeless body into the sewers.

The unimaginable brutality of it literally took my breath away. Ugh! It was a horrible picture, much worse than all the visions of amputation I'd seen in my imagination when Francesca started in on her nuts project. As the headless body circled and floated past me, disappearing into the darkness again, I wondered who could have done such a thing to a defenceless creature - and most of all, why. Although the victim had lost his head, which made it harder for me to identify the breed, the body, even deformed as it was, told my expert eye that this had been an ordinary European Shorthair. The members of this breed weren't exactly famous for wholesale aggression, and they certainly didn't go gunning for jokers whose fangs were drooling with murderous lust. But was the monstrous murderer necessarily an animal?
Homo sapiens
was more given to such bloodthirsty goings-on, to the infliction of pointless violence just for the fun to be got out of suffering. There was one good argument against this theory, however: humans like to use instruments of various kinds when practising torture. Those instruments are symbols of their power - are even glorified in their culture as fetishes. As far as I could tell, however, the injuries inflicted in this case had not been made by knives, scalpels or sharp, pointed objects. No, they were the work of elemental, unadulterated violence arising from a natural and insatiable lust for blood. I hated to admit it to myself, but the whole thing looked horribly like one of those inexplicable fits of brutality in which my own kind sometimes indulge.

The horrific object was drifting away again. In my imagination it turned into a floating coffin decked with flowers, the sort of funeral people still give the dead today in some exotic cultures. Finally the darkness swallowed it up. I looked the way it had gone for some time longer, as if hypnotised, full of deep and genuine grief. As I stood there I imagined how this fellow member of my species might have looked in life. His fur, white as blossom, must surely have shone in the midday sun like dazzling snow; his sapphire eyes would have seemed to bore right through a chance observer if their glances met. And when he slept by a glowing fire on a frosty winter evening, stretching and flexing his muscles as if in a trance, he must have been over a metre long. He had certainly been a rare jewel of his species, in fact the cat's whiskers, and a source of fascination to one and all. So it was particularly shattering to think of his meeting such a dreadful, undignified end. 'Goodbye, white stranger,' I said at last, out loud. 'We shall meet in heaven.'

Good grief, what did I think I was up to? Hadn't I anything better to do than mourn an unknown corpse and deliver melancholy funeral orations? How did I know the gourmet who had learnt to know and love the deceased as cocktail nibbles wasn't lying in wait right now, somewhere near at hand, following the course of my investigations with a grin and indulging in culinary fantasies as his belly rumbled? I was in a kind of anteroom to hell, after all, a place into which those above off-loaded all their nastier and less attractive products, consigning them to the process of decay. There were no Gustavs here to step in at the last moment if some deranged cannibal went for my windpipe, no offices with nostalgic old telephones where the Philip Marlowe of the pointy-eared race could retreat when his detective work was done. There was nothing here but gloom, damp and dirt - and eerily bloated corpses. And who knew, perhaps there really were dear little goblins living in the sewers who usually ate shit and drank industrial waste, but might fancy a change from their usual diet if a small creature on his travels fetched up in their domain? I imagined them as slavering horror versions of some supermarket chain's consumer research project ...

As if my negative thinking had actually conjured up the evil thing itself, I suddenly heard a stealthy rustling. It resonated through the tunnel and then mingled with the echoes of the drops and those other eerie noises which probably came from the imperceptible 'breathing' of such a huge stone maze. Before I could erect my fur into bristles with alarm and arch my back in defence, I heard another rustling sound, rather closer this time. I tried and failed to decide which direction it was coming from. In rapid succession, like a motor-driven camera rattling away, my eyes fixed on all the unlit corners from which a monster might spring at any moment, on all the dancing shadows on the walls. Discouraged, I realised there was nothing to be seen. Yet I instinctively felt that these transient noises couldn't be put down either to my overheated imagination or to any chance activity that happened to produce sound. At a moment of suspense like this in a thriller movie you generally see the hero's black colleague emerge from the darkness, whereupon the hero breathes a sigh of relief because that explains the creaking door which made his flesh creep. I wasn't sure if I'd have found a variant on that theme particularly reassuring just now. Calling on my common sense, therefore, I decided to put my previous plan into action: I'd go on along the walkway until I found some way out of the sewers, and never mind how often the ghosts rattled their chains to scare me.