The Wildings (10 page)

The dog lolloped towards him.

“Run, Southpaw!” he heard Katar say from what seemed like a great distance away. “Towards the trees—at the back, Southpaw!” Miao said. The kitten was unable to move his paws. He watched in horror as the dog came steadily closer and closer. Its teeth were bared, and Southpaw could imagine what it would feel like when those large fangs tore through his skin.

And then, from deep inside the Shuttered House, the kitten heard a mocking voice whisper, as though its owner was sitting right beside him, “Stupid, foolish piece of meat. You’ll be dead soon if you don’t get your paws moving, not that it’s any of my business.” It was an insidious, cold voice, with not a touch of
warmth in it, but for some reason it helped Southpaw break through his terror.

The dog was inches away from the kitten now. Southpaw let out his best high-pitched warrior’s yell, put his ears back, turned and ran for it.

Behind him, he heard the dog bark. From the tree, Miao’s voice said frantically, “Southpaw! Not there! You’ll be trapped!” He could sense Katar coming down from the tree, streaking across the grounds to battle the dog. And he could tell that as fast as he was running, the dog would catch up soon. Its stink was in his nostrils, the smell of damp fur, adrenaline and a predator’s sweat. Southpaw’s ears were flat to the side of his head; two predators in one day was a bit much for a kitten who hadn’t even been on his first hunt yet.

Katar’s urgent warnings were now so sharp that they made his whiskers crackle: “You have no room to turn, get away from the veranda: look up, Southpaw.” Too late—the kitten was heading straight towards the Shuttered House, and with the dog so close behind, he had no time to try and streak down the side. But though the verandah was a dusty place that radiated forlorn abandonment, the kitten’s heart beat faster when he saw the two or three bits of broken furniture that sat on the porch.

Miao was still howling defiance at the dog, trying to attract its attention, and Southpaw sensed that the old Siamese had come down from her tree. But the dog was barking, joyously, bounding up the stone stairs of the veranda behind him, its muzzle dangerously close.

Southpaw knew exactly where he was headed, though, and feinting to the right, he shot sharply to the left instead, leaving
the dog skidding behind him, its paws clacking on the slippery stone. On the veranda, pressed up against the peeling front door of the Shuttered House, was a low cane bed, and the kitten had just enough space to squeeze himself under it. His whiskers crackled, and he knew Miao was calling in all other cats in the area to help with this emergency.

“Good thinking,” Katar said, “Hang on in there until we can lure the dog away—just stay under the bed no matter what happens, Southpaw.”

The dog barked again, and through the cane slats, Southpaw could see its black eyes, keen, hungry for a kill, frustrated. There was a scrabbling above his head, and the kitten scrabbled backwards as a large, heavy paw slammed through the cane. Splinters and dust rained down on Southpaw’s head, making him sneeze. The cane was rotten, worn through by years and years of monsoons, warped by the heat of many summers. It would yield soon enough. The paw slammed down again, perilously close to his nose, and the kitten whimpered. He was trapped.

Katar growled, trying to get the dog to turn, but the beast swivelled once, snarled in warning at the tomcat and barked defiance at him. “My kill!” said the dog in Junglee, the language of the hedges; all animals knew it, even though most could communicate only the most basic warnings and requests in that tongue.

In response, the tomcat bit his tail; the dog whirled, howling in anger, shaking the cat off with such force that Katar was thrown a considerable distance. Dazed, he lay on the grass, and Miao slipped over to his side, standing guard so that the dog wouldn’t attack him while he was down.

Intent on its original target, the dog nosed the dry wood where it had cracked, then jerked its head up, splintering the cane further. Southpaw backed away as far as he could, trembling.

From behind the door, a cold whisper reached him. “Poor helpless kitty,” said the voice. “Look at the way the beast crunches the cane. It has such powerful, strong jaws, doesn’t it? Look at its teeth: they’re such sharp, yellow teeth, aren’t they? It’ll hurt a lot when those reach you, meat, but it won’t hurt for very long, will it?” There was a rusty, prickling tug at his whiskers that sounded like dark laughter, and the kitten shuddered.

The dog slammed its paw into the cane, and the bed sighed and broke. Southpaw yelped as the cane dropped in front of his face, grazing his whiskers; now he was caught firmly like a rat in a trap. The kitten scrambled backwards, feeling the door behind him, and then he heard a ripping sound, and felt one of the old, sodden planks of the door begin to give way.

At the edge of the veranda, Miao had crept up, and she slashed twice, viciously, at the dog’s leg. It howled as her claws raked its side, but when it spun around, Miao had melted away into the shadows. The dog padded a few paces away from the bed, head cocked as it tried to scent the Siamese. Then it lost interest, and turned back to the kitten.

It shoved a paw right through the part of the cane that was over Southpaw’s head, and the kitten cringed, looking up into air, his gaze locking with the dog’s victorious eyes. The next blow, or the one after that, would get him, and he saw the gleam of saliva on the dog’s teeth as the animal contemplated its next move.

Miao had climbed up to the roof of the veranda, and now she dropped down, landing on the dog’s back. She sank her teeth into its flank, screaming a battle cry at the big beast. It whirled, growling ferociously, and for a time it looked as though the cat was riding a bucking horse rather than a dog. “Get off or you’ll be killed!” Katar called, getting unsteadily to his feet. The Siamese narrowed her eyes, preparing to leap clear. Cats rarely attacked dogs, and when they did, the best chance of a clean attack was to make a fast, dirty assault and then a quick getaway.

“Move one: she’ll lose her balance, fall off, but land on her feet,” said the cold voice in Southpaw’s ear. “Move two: she’s a fast runner, so she’ll get away before the dog realizes she’s off its back. Move three: back to where we started. You’re dead meat. It’s a sad little story, but it’s just not your lucky day.”

The Siamese was shaken so hard that it looked as though she was flying off the dog’s back. She hit the ground running, and the beast’s massive jaws snapped shut on empty air. The dog howled its anger and defiance, but Miao, moving so fast she’d looked as though she was floating across the grass, was already halfway up a tree. The dog wasted no further time on her; it was back at the veranda in two paces, and it was in a killing mood.

“Or,” said the cold, bored voice, “you could take your chances with us. We’ll kill you as well, but at least we’re your own kind. I’ll give you a sporting chance, how about that?” From inside the house, a paw flicked at the rotten planks, creating a hole in the door.

Southpaw stared at the dog. The animal was poised above
him; its tongue was hanging out, and in a few seconds, its paw would slam down, perhaps for the last time.

From where he was, standing but wobbly in the undergrowth, Katar guessed the kitten’s thoughts. “Not the Shuttered House, Southpaw! It’s too dangerous!”

The stench of the Shuttered House was strong in the kitten’s nostrils, the scent of death, decay, blood and madness. The house held the promise of death, but perhaps, thought Southpaw, he might escape from whatever was in there. But there was no escape from the dog, who was leaning in for the killing bite.

“Oh, do come in, meat,” said the insidious voice. “It”ll be so much fun.”

The dog’s paw came crashing down just as Southpaw threw himself backwards, breaking through the soft wood of the plank, tumbling into the Shuttered House as Miao and Katar watched helplessly.

“For us, that is,” added the chilly voice, as Southpaw disappeared from view.

T
he fall was longer than Southpaw had expected; the floor of the house was sunken, lower than the verandah, and the kitten twisted in the air, trying to make sure that he would land on his paws and not his back.

He was ready to fight for his life, spitting for all that he was worth. But he landed into silence and a deep, pervasive gloom. Outside, the dog barked and hurled itself against the door, but the rotten panel aside, the frame and the wood were solid and they held fast.

The kitten could smell cats, though he could see none. The odour was sharp, and close, as though the space had only been recently vacated, and he felt the fur on his face, the whiskers on his forehead, stand up as he sensed the presence of others. Southpaw kept his back to the splintered door, and tried to make sense of his surroundings. The only light in the room came from a single grimy, dim lightbulb; it was like looking
through a winter fog. The kitten’s nose and his whiskers gave him a better feel of the place.

The Shuttered House was quiet, but besides the clicking of the beetles—much louder in his ears than he would have liked—Southpaw could hear the rustles and scurries of many animals. Overhead, a set of claws clicked across the floor; and then another, and then more. To his right, the darkness yielded to give him a glimpse of a long room, and to his disgust, the kitten realized that the ground beneath his paws was filthy, the floor matted with a thick film of what appeared to be old newspapers and long-rotted food. At the far end of the hallway he stood in were lines and lines of bowls, the smell of stale food rising sour and thick into the air.

The curtains were drawn and tattered, and where they had fallen into shreds, the glass of the windows was thickly layered with grime. Dead flies clustered on the sills. The kitten knew without being told that the doors and windows hadn’t been opened for a long, long while. The rank vapours of unclean litter from the back of the room offended his nostrils. It added to the soaring, unpleasantly high scent he had smelled from outside. Southpaw had a sudden flash of intuition. “This is a place,” he said to himself, “where cats have forgotten what it is to feel the sunlight on their whiskers.”

“Impressive,” said the cold voice, from a distance. “Our little visitor here thinks we miss the sunlight? He thinks we have no games of our own, yes? Shall we show him how we play? Aconite? Ratsbane?”

Southpaw growled, twitching his whiskers to see if he could locate the owner of the voice. But the darkness was still too
thick; his eyes hadn’t yet fully adjusted, and moving further inside was far too risky. He could still smell the dog outside, and hear its growls, but he hoped it would go away before it was too late, and he could use that bolthole.

“Where are my manners?” said the voice. “I’m Datura, little piece of meat. Forgive me for not making introductions: we aren’t used to visitors here.” The voice was moving across the room, and Southpaw snarled, baring his tiny teeth.

This time, he could sense the laughter rippling out from several sets of whiskers, all around the room. Upstairs, the sounds of scurrying became louder. Southpaw tried to remember what Katar had told him about using his whiskers to sense predators, but though he could raise his black whiskers up just as the tomcat had, he felt nothing in the air. He hadn’t learned the finer points of sensing, and the kitten hoped his unseen enemies wouldn’t be able to guess how vulnerable he was.

“Fresh meat,” another voice whispered, making Southpaw bristle in alarm. This one sounded as though it was at the far end of the room. “Hold, Aconite,” said Datura’s voice, his mew sharper than normal. “But it’s been so long since we had visitors.” There was something oily about the second cat’s voice, and Southpaw felt his fur crawl, as though he had sat in a nest of ants. “Two seasons since the roofboards rotted and that stray tomcat fell in. It was summer, do you remember?”

“I remember,” said Datura. There was a sigh among the unseen cats in the room, and Southpaw felt his whiskers rise along with theirs. It was an unpleasant feeling, as though someone had tugged on his whiskers without his permission. The air felt prickly, claustrophobic, and though Datura had
stopped talking, Southpaw felt himself included in the silent images that the cats of the Shuttered House were sharing among themselves.

The stray cat had fallen in at the height of summer, when the cats were restless from the heat, picking fights with each other, vying for the coolest spots in the shade. The roof had parted, rotten from the previous monsoon, and Aconite had jumped back in alarm as the cat came yowling down in a shower of plaster. It was a young tomcat, and it had screamed in pain as it hit the ground, unable to turn its paws in time.

“How he cried!” said Aconite’s voice, remembering. “His poor paw was broken, wasn’t that so? He could barely stand up; his paw was swelling, and he had to drag himself upright, drag himself away from us. Such a pity that he didn’t get very far.”

“Where did he go?” asked Southpaw, feeling sorry for the unknown tomcat, empathizing, as all cats instinctively did when they heard of another’s mishaps.