Norton, Andre - Anthology (17 page)

 
          
 
"Where do animal spirits go?" Key
asked.

 
          
 
"I've forgotten."

 
          
 
"Me, too. They told us once. Maybe the
angels will stop the cat from going wherever he's supposed to go and let him
come with us."

 
          
 
"Where are we going to keep him?"
Kip said. "And how can we feed a cat?"

 
          
 
"The angels might help us if we ask
nicely." Key shrugged. "I bet we could."

 
          
 
The door opened behind them, and both jinn
turned, then started. Key gaped and poked Kip repeatedly. "He did come
back!" She knelt beside Andrew as he touched the cat under the chin. The
cat had purred to himself, but when he raised his eyes and saw the huge figure,
he hissed.

 
          
 
"Come on." Andrew spoke in a low
tone with an undercurrent of laughter, and Kip frowned until she realized the
humor was directed at himself. "You're about to cost me a thousand dollars
at the vet. The least you can do is not bite me."

 
          
 
I didn't ask you to spend anything, the cat
thought. And I'll bite when I feel like it. I just don't feel like it now.

 
          
 
The jinn climbed into the back seat of
Andrew's car and followed him for the rest of the day. At the vet's office,
they stood together and watched the cat lap up big bowls of water. "He was
thirsty," Key said. "I didn't realize. Everything was frozen."

 
          
 
Jinn, the cat thought.

 
          
 
The vet gave Andrew some salve for the cat's
frostbitten paws at a cost far less than a thousand dollars, then sent him
home. The jinn slipped into the house.

 
          
 
"Do you think he'll like it?" The
cat had dashed behind the sofa and crouched, tense and alert. Andrew,
meanwhile, had rummaged in his closet until he found a stand covered with pink
carpet. The man had found a handful of mice that lacked any sort of mouse haze,
and Kip realized they weren't real.

 
          
 
Key nudged the pink carpeted thing with her
toe. "What's that?"

 
          
 
“I have no idea. Come here." Kip had
found a picture in the drawer with the false mice. "See—he's holding
another cat. He used to have another cat."

 
          
 
The cat had curled up beneath one of the
couches, his eyes closed. Vm not going to sleep, though. He could smell another
cat, but it hadn't been in the house for a few weeks, like the stale perfume he
could also smell.

 
          
 
Ridiculous for him to do all this. The cat
knew he could leave when he felt like it. But for the moment he didn't feel
like leaving. A few minutes later, he had purred himself to sleep.

 
          
 
Andrew stood in the kitchen, watching the
couch where he'd let the cat retreat once he came into the apartment. The cat
still hadn't eaten the Siamese's remaining can of cat food (some gourmet brand
he probably couldn't recognize as food after months of hunting mice), but he
had drunk an awful lot. Andrew didn't disturb the cat, except to talk to him
from time to time. "There's plenty of room in the apartment if you care to
sulk," he said. "I can show you all the best places for that. But
when you're rested, you can come sit with me."

 
          
 
He hadn't named the cat yet, but for some
reason the word "Arrow" kept coming to him.

 
          
 
Andrew had a trick left. It had worked, at
least, when he still wanted to, ingratiate himself with the Siamese. He sat on
the living room floor with a deck of cards, and he shuffled it for a long time
before dealing himself a hand of solitaire. Five minutes. Deal the cards,
shuffle, lay them in stacks with a snap. Ten minutes. Shuffle again. Deal.

 
          
 
He looked up to a tortoiseshell face with
round, relaxed eyes.

 
          
 
"Well, hello," he said to the cat.

 
          
 
You didn't make me come out, the cat thought,
giving his paw a lick. I felt like it.

 
          
 
"He'll be all right now," Key said.
"Come on."

 
          
 
Sunset had been recent enough that they still
could slip through the door without opening it, but night made them more solid
every minute. Kip and Key ran across the street and had a near miss with a
station wagon, but on the other side they laughed and looked into the field.

 
          
 
"We still didn't find that arrow,"
Kip said.

 
          
 
"Easy enough." Key drew her bow.
"Maybe another arrow will lead us to the first."

 
          
 
An angelic hand landed on their shoulders, and
the jinn stopped. "Or maybe we should scour the underbrush," Kip
said.

            
Charles L. Fontenay
wrote science fiction for a decade in the 1950-60s and returned to the field
several years ago. Since then a number of his shorter works have appeared in
magazines and anthologies, including Catfantastic III. Three novels in his
young adult science fiction mystery series The Kipton Chronicles were published
in the last year. He lives and writes in
St. Petersburg
,
Florida
.

            
Harlan stretched
laxly along the back of the sofa like a limp rug. The big black cat's eyes were
closed and his only sign of life was the flick of an ear, as though he knew he
had become the object of current conversation.

            
"He really seems
to belong to the house," said Miss Hettie. "Or maybe the other way
around. He certainly isn't an ordinary stray. When he came stalking up, I thought
he might belong to that nice young man, Brett Warren, who was so helpful when I
moved in, but Brett said no, he doesn't even like cats."

            
"Oh, cats and
the Larchmare House just seem to go together naturally," said Rowena,
lifting a shell-thin cup to take a sip of Earl Grey tea. "As a little
girl, I used to sneak over here and play with all their cats when the Larchmare
family was still alive."

 
          
 
"Oh? I thought that was before your time,
Rowena." Rowena was Miss Hettie's best friend from church and, of course,
the first person she'd invited for tea since moving into the Larchmare House.

 
          
 
The Larchmare House. The many chambered,
tall-ceilinged house lay silent around the two old ladies, a reverberating
silence. It was a house of the late nineteenth century, when Gregor Larchmare
was the richest man in town (then really only a town, not a city), its bricks
baked and laid by slaves, a house of columns and turrets so sturdy that it had
survived the years of neglect when it stood unoccupied, survived in surprisingly
good shape.

 
          
 
"I think I'm a few years older than you,
Hettie," said Rowena with a smile. "The Larchmare family was wiped
out in 1912, and I was ten years old by then."

 
          
 
"You're right. I was only three. But you
knew, didn't you, my father was a first cousin of the Larchmares? That's how I
happened to inherit this house. And of course I'm interested, I've heard so
many tales. What really happened to the Larchmares?"

 
          
 
“I’ve heard that story all my life—the true
one. I knew the family, after all. Mr. and Mrs. Larchmare were in their fifties
and all four of their children were grown but still living here with them:
three girls and the youngest, Leonard, in his middle twenties and a strange,
quiet young fellow. Leonard proved to be really aberrant. One evening after
everybody was asleep he slipped around and strangled them all to death, one
after the other, along with a visiting relative. The only one who escaped was
the visitor's baby- daughter, who was lured out of the house and away from it
by the family cat, almost as if intentionally. They found her wandering alone
the next morning, half a mile away, the cat still with her."

 
          
 
"What happened to Leonard? Was he brought
to justice?"

 
          
 
"No, Leonard disappeared. They never
found him. And you can imagine, Hettie, after something like that the house had
a bad reputation. Superstitious people claimed it was haunted, there were
stories of weird lights seen through the windows and of people disappearing
here. That sort of thing is why it was almost impossible to rent the place and
it just sat here and deteriorated until you came down to take it over."

 
          
 
Well, it didn't deteriorate so badly, thought
Miss Hettie after Rowena left. Of course some parts of the house were in worse
shape than others, especially the back, both upstairs and downstairs. But the
front of the house was in excellent condition and Miss Hettie needed only a few
good rooms—in effect a small apartment—to live in.

 
          
 
''Shucks, it never was as bad as folks liked
to think, Miss Hettie," had said Brett Warren with his winning smile when
he was so kindly helping her move things in and put them in the right places.
"Most of the damage hasn't been from neglect but happened 'bout ten years
ago when the company managing the place decided to rent it out to three
different families, trying to make some profit on it. Dividing it into
apartments, sort of. except the absentee owner wouldn't let 'em build any
partitions between 'em."

 
          
 
Miss Hettie knew about that. The
"absentee owner" had been her father. And, as Rowena had told her,
those renters moved out one after another because, as one of them put it,
"they's somethin' about that house that ain't natural."

 
          
 
Remembering what Rowena had told her, Miss
Hettie said, "My niece in
New Jersey
thinks it's too dangerous for me to be
living here by myself." At the time they were in the side yard, where
Brett was showing her the layout of the flower beds. Brett seemed to know a
great deal about the Larchmare House. Harlan lay stretched in the window above
them, a black shadow overseeing them.

 
          
 
Brett laughed.

 
          
 
"
New Jersey
?" he repeated. "Whoever said
urban
New
Jersey
's
'safe'?"

 
          
 
Miss Hettie said much the same thing to her
niece when Allyson telephoned to try to talk her into coming back to
New Jersey
and settling down sensibly. That was the
occasion on which Miss Hettie discovered Harlan could talk.

 
          
 
"I'm perfectly all right here and I think
I'm going to be very comfortable, Allyson," Miss Hettie assured her.
'There's a grocery that will deliver my order, and if I need to go to a store,
I have friends from church who don't mind driving me."

 
          
 
"That isn't the point," contended
Allyson. "When you said you were going to
Florida
to look at the house, I had no idea you'd
decide to stay there and live in it. Aunt Hettie, you're eight-five years old
and it's not safe for you to be living alone in a city like that."

 
          
 
"A city like what?" Miss Hettie
demanded. "It's a beautiful place, which is more than you can say for the
crowded streets and empty buildings all around you there. There are palm trees
and flowers blooming all year round, and I don't have to put up with your ice
and snow in the winter. And what's unsafe about living here, I'd like to know?
If I fall ill, this nice young man, Brett Warren, lives somewhere close and
keeps an eye on me."

 
          
 
"But there you're alone in a house, not
in an apartment where you have other people living around you . . . and me not
far away. What concerns me is, I've read about the crime rate there and these
young thugs target elderly, helpless people. One of them could break in some
night and cut your throat."

 
          
 
"Oh, foof! That's a different part of the
city. This is a low-crime area. The folks who live around here are
respectable—and friendly."

 
          
 
"But if someone did break in and attack
you, there's no one there to protect you."

 
          
 
"Oh, Harlan's all the protection I
need," replied Miss Hettie airily.

 
          
 
"That cat? What could he do?"

 
          
 
"Scratch their eyes out. Wouldn't you,
Harlan?"

 
          
 
Allyson gave it up. Miss Hettie hung up the
phone triumphantly, got to her feet, and turned up the lights in the room.
Harlan raised his head and opened yellow eyes, looking straight at her.

 
          
 
"She's right, you know," said
Harlan.

 
          
 
Miss Hettie was far too advanced in years to
nearly jump out of her skin, as she would have when she was younger. She just
said "gurk" very softly and sat down rather abruptly on the sofa,
turning to stare at him over her spectacles and wondering if she was getting so
old she'd started imagining things. For years Miss Hettie had kept cats and
during those years, living alone, she had formed the habit of talking to them,
but this was the first time any of them ever talked back to her.

 
          
 
"It's funny," she said to Harlan,
"but I thought I just heard you say something."

 
          
 
"You did." replied Harlan. Odd, the
cat's voice wasn't strong, something like a child's, but there wasn't a trace
of a meow in it. “But I don't see what's funny about it. I didn't make a
joke."

 
          
 
There must be a snappy comeback to that. Miss
Hettie thought, but her repartee wasn't as quick as it once had been.

 
          
 
"If you actually did say something."
she wanted to know, "why haven't you spoken up before?"

 
          
 
"There hasn't been any reason for me to
say anything before and, unlike humans, cats don't chatter unnecessarily,"
said Harlan, arising on the sofa back and stretching indolently. "This
time I felt I ought to say something because Allyson's right about it."

 
          
 
"Oh. is that so?" Miss Hettie was
somewhat piqued. "And what makes you an authority, Mister?"

 
          
 
"Oh, I get around. There are creatures
that prowl at night, and this house isn't as safe as you think. Now, I like
your preference for living alone—it's catlike. But it isn't humanlike."

 
          
 
"What do you mean, it isn't 'humanlike'?
I've lived alone all my adult life except in college, when I had roommates.
It's natural for a lady who chooses never to marry to live alone."

 
          
 
"It still isn't humanlike,"
contended Harlan. "You humans are descended from monkeys, so you're social
animals who like to run in crowds and chatter at one another. We cats are
descended from . . . well, cats. We're solitary animals by nature—and we're
predators."

 
          
 
Harlan was a predator all right ... or, at
least, he was a fighter. On three occasions already she had had to rush outside
as fast as her aged legs would carry her to rescue some neighbor's cat (in one
case a small dog) from Harlan's fierce protection of his bailiwick. She always
got there too late, when the intruding animal had fled and Harlan was stalking
around like a conquering hero, his fur fluffed up and his yellow eyes glowing.

 
          
 
"I deny that I or any of my family
descended from monkeys," said Miss Hettie stoutly. "I've never put
any stock in that evolution stuff."

 
          
 
"Even so, you should listen to your
niece. She's more in touch with the times. Now, as a reward for my making an
exception to a very firm rule and revealing to you that I can talk, do you
suppose you could spare a saucer of milk? Whole milk, please, none of that skim
stuff."

 
          
 
A reasonable request. Miss Hettie got up off
the sofa—a slower and more difficult action than once—and toddled into the
kitchen—actually a small room in the front of the house converted into a
kitchen, as the original huge kitchen was far in the back of the house. She
drank skim milk with her meals because the doctor said it was better for her
and there wasn't any whole milk in the refrigerator. But she did have a small
carton half full of half-and-half she kept for Sally Willis' coffee when Sally
came over, and she poured most of that for the cat. Harlan growled about it
deep in his throat, but he drank it.