by Adrian
“It’s all in his study,” Mrs Bechter explained, as if he would know where that was,
and she loitered in the hall for some time before taking him up the stairs to show him.
Looking on that, where the great man had worked, Stewart nodded grimly. “I see why
you said I could stay over here.” He had been hoping just to box up Bechter’s research
materials and get them home, but every flat surface was spread with papers and open books,
annotated and marked with scraps and post-its and red pen. Every surface was heaped with
them: desk, table, shelves, even the top of an old drained fish tank that now held nothing but
dust and sand. Anatomised in every part of the room was an unfolding project in medias res.
Bechter had indeed been in the midst of his work when he died, and what Stewart saw didn’t
look like something a week from completion. The chance to get my name on it, beneath his,
he reminded himself, and besides, he would get his share of the advance monies. The deal
that Mrs Bechter had put to him had been surprisingly generous.
“Have you...?” He gestured towards the papers.
17
Short Changes
Adrian Tchaikovsky
She shook her head quickly. “I was going to, Dr Tyrrel, but... I can’t stand to stay in
the house now...”
“Now he’s gone.”
“It’s more like he’s not gone. I’m sorry but... My husband was a difficult man to get
on with, towards the end. He was very wrapped up in his work. Very committed to it. We
didn’t speak much, not much at all. It was hard to be in the house with him. It was like I was
sharing him, like he was married to someone else. I don’t know what you or his colleagues
got from him, but at the end it was all I could do to force a few words from him. I think that
the only thing he cared about at all was his work and his beloved Felix.” She said the name
with utter disdain, and Stewart recalled the flap he had seen in the front door, and marked
Mrs Bechter down as ‘not a cat person.’
“Well I’ll get right down to work, Mrs Bechter. It’ll take me a little while to catch up
with where George was, and after that I should hopefully be able to give you an idea of how
much longer this will take. Or did you want me to liaise with the publishers direct?” He was
already seeing his name on the cover. After George’s, of course, but there was plainly enough
work left to do that he could snag a co-authorship, and this would be George Bechter’s final,
posthumous work, a grand opportunity for Stewart to step into his shoes as the leading man
on Pythagorean philosophy.
“There’s some tins and things in the cupboards, still,” she prompted. “Tea, milk. I
made sure...”
“I saw a Tescos down the road,” Stewart confirmed. “I’ll be fine.” He could see she
was desperate to go. “I’ll keep in touch.”
He had intended to spend his first day in the Bechter place just sorting himself out, but the
lure of the work, all those books opening their secrets to him, ensured that he was at the dead
man’s desk within an hour of the widow’s leaving, reading through the draft chapters on the
man’s computer, locating the reference works that Bechter quoted. Classical Theories of
Metempsychosis, was the title. There had been few more brilliant scholars of ancient Greek
philosophy than George Bechter. In his declining years, Stewart had seen his thoughts darken
with each season, reflected in the shifting focus of his papers and his talks. Everything had
been about ancient death, in the end, until this last book had outlived him.
Or perhaps not death. Stewart read over Bechter’s notes on the Pythagoreans, who all
accounts claimed were strong proponents of metempsychosis: the flight of a soul on death,
reincarnation, transmigration into other bodies, animals, trees, a web of constantly turning life that knew no true extinction. Sitting there, knowing that the man who had made those notes
had indeed passed on along that wheel, or perhaps just into oblivion, Stewart felt an odd
sense of his own mortality. You too shall pass, was written between those cramped lines of
handwriting, or in the double spacing of the 12 point Courier on the screen. Only through this
shall we be remembered at all.
Unless the Pythagoreans had the right of it, anyway, Stewart considered wryly. And
where was old Pythagoras now, in that case?
The lights flickered just with that thought, which gave him a bit of a turn. He had not
noted the march of the hours but dusk was already well established beyond the windows. He
drew the curtains, and spared a thought for the decades old wiring in that dilapidated house.
18
Short Changes
Adrian Tchaikovsky
Bet George didn’t spring for an electrician often. He should at least find out where the fuse
box was, now, in case something failed after dark.
He stepped away from the desk, then, and did a tour of the house, room after room of
peeling green wallpaper and nicotine-yellowed paint. Fully half the house was given over to
cobwebs and dust, surplus to requirements for decades. The Bechter children had presumably
grown up and moved out long before, and it didn’t look as though any of them had cared
enough to come back and assist their mother with the estate.
He found the fuse box at last in a well concealed cupboard under the stairs, checked to
see how it worked and how he could reset things if need be. The sight of it, a rather more
modern contrivance than he had been fearing, improved his spirits.
Then something moved, a furtive scurrying shuffle, and he went quite still.
Deep down at the back, where all pretence at being a cupboard left off, and it was just
“under the stairs” – an irregular, part-walled space leading only to darkness - the light from
outside glinted back at him. For a moment Stewart stared, assuming that he had imagined it,
that he was making patterns where there was nothing, but no: something was huddled back
there, staring out at him as he stood silhouetted in the doorway.
It took a moment for the name to come to him. “Felix,” he recalled. Opening the
cupboard door wide as it would go, the animal was still just a little lump of fuzzy darkness
barely separate from the shadow around it.
“Here, Felix.” Stewart held out a hand and made mouse-noises between his lips, but
he could not reach in far enough, and Felix just huddled further away, the eyes glinting
suspicion back at him. Small enough to be a kitten, Stewart decided. And terrified. But
hungry, surely. Unless there are mice…
I’ll leave the door open, anyway. Stewart had always lived in houses with cats. The
thought of Felix gracing the study while he worked was a pleasant one. Good to have some
company. His general uncharitable thoughts about Mrs Bechter the non-cat-person hardened.
I bet she didn’t waste much time looking for you, poor bugger.
He poked around for some cat food, found none, and eventually got down to Tescos
just before it shut. Before turning in, he put out a bowl of meaty chunks for Felix, imagining
that little patch of shade detaching itself from the dark of the cupboard to steal silently up and eat its fill while he slept.
The next morning began in triumph. He had been an hour at Bechter’s desk, despairing over
how
unfinished everything looked, when he discovered a hitherto overlooked folder on the
man’s desktop that turned out to contain a far more polished version of the book, with various
sections intended for review all flagged up helpfully in red. Suddenly what had looked like a
month’s work was decidedly closer to the week that the Widow Bechter had sold him on.
The cat food had not been touched, he saw. Maybe it is mice he eats, then. Or maybe
he just doesn’t trust me yet. Certainly when he poked his head into the cupboard there was no
sign of a feline occupant.
He rang Mrs Bechter on the strength of his discovery, and confirmed that things were
going well. She sounded somewhat smugly pleased, to his ear, and so he felt he had to put in,
“I’ve seen Felix, by the way.”
19
Short Changes
Adrian Tchaikovsky
There was a startled silence on the other end of the line, and then she said, “You mean
the photos in the kitchen?”
He had been meandering that way to make tea, but now he quickened his pace,
because he hadn’t paid much notice to the décor the previous night. “No, I mean Felix, Mrs
Bechter,” he said sternly.
“Oh…” She sounded just as guilty as he had hoped. “Oh dear, I hadn’t thought… I
hope…”
“Oh I’ll be fine,” he assured her, with heavy I-am-a-cat-person subtext. “He and I’ll
get along swimmingly.”
“She,” Mrs Bechter corrected him.
“Odd name for a she,” he noted. The kettle was on and he turned to look at the framed
photographs. No happy couple shot for the Bechters, it seemed, but separate his and hers.
There was George, surely taken only a year or so before he died, a hollow-cheeked old man
with a pipe in one hand, glasses so thick you could have bottomed bottles with the lenses.
The shot had him leaning on the aquarium that Stewart had seen upstairs, looking
thoughtfully off into the distance. Not a happy man, but not an unhappy one either. Resigned,
maybe.
“He named her for the saint,” Mrs Bechter said, with all that disapproval back in her
voice, as though she was not a saint person either. “Are you sure…”
“Oh, I’ll be fine.” The other picture was Mrs Bechter, probably taken about the same
time. The cat that she held was grey and baggy and stared out of the frame as though it was
pleading with the photographer for help. To her credit, Mrs Bechter had obviously got over
her cat-phobia for the split second required to get a decent shot, but Stewart could only
imagine the story behind that. Had George been begging with the woman to just pretend to be
friends with his poor abused cat for the photo? Had she and the cat agreed a brief mutual
détente only to humour him?
Working late that night, he heard the creak of the door, and from the corner of his eye he
glimpsed the low, smoothly-running shape bolt into the room and lose itself – herself –
amidst Bechter’s clutter. Reliving the lives of the philosophers, men from an age when reason
and science, religion and magic all went hand in hand, Stewart felt that he could imagine a
great sense of approval from somewhere in the room as Felix watched him work. When he
left the desk, to answer the call of nature or to make some tea, he imagined a spark of
frustration, claws digging in to the carpet in a minute tantrum. Like some tomb guardian of
old Egypt, Felix was overseeing the completion of her master’s work.
He was at the computer until late, past midnight, because the book really was coming
together. Each section that Bechter had flagged up had references, facts to check, papers
noted for reading, but everything was around him somewhere. Navigating through the stacks
of journals and photocopies and precarious towers of books, decoding the dead man’s
haphazard system, the process was like some sort of vision quest, or an initiation rite into
some great classical mystery. From time to time he caught glimpses of Felix, or thought he
did – just a dark shape slinking by secret ways about the room, or the glint of those big eyes,
cautious of him, and yet almost proprietary. Once, his hand brushed fur, a startled moment
before the animal was gone in a flurry. And yet something was nagging him, and nagged at
20
Short Changes
Adrian Tchaikovsky
him as he went to sleep in Bechter’s own bed, with the sense of Felix somewhere in the room,
crouching and settling and always keeping watch.
He awoke with the suspicion full-formed, and spent two valuable working hours
searching the house – not for a cat, but for its effects. The flap was there, certainly, but he had already noted that the Bechters were out of catfood, and there was no litter tray, no cat toys,
none of the paraphernalia that the cat owner should accumulate. Yes, cats came and went, and
probably the animal was outside even now, but a suspicion was growing in him, and he called
up Mrs Bechter again.
He recalled that awkward conversation of the other day, the change in her tone when
he had mentioned seeing Felix. He had pegged her as a woman who disliked cats, but now he
thought back on her words, the echo of them in his head suggested something other.
“Mrs Bechter.” It was after he had reported his good progress, reassured her that he
was sound, sane, sensible and progressing. “Felix… predeceased your husband, didn’t she?”
“By only a few days,” came her whisper on the other end of the line. “I think that was
the last straw for George. He did love her, doted on her.” And there was the bitterness he was
ready for, because plainly she felt he had loved his pet more than he had loved his wife.
“When I said that I…” He wasn’t sure how to say it. “You said you couldn’t stay in
the house. Was it…?”
“Yes.” He had to strain to hear her voice. “I kept seeing… I don’t believe in ghosts,
Dr Tyrrel, really I don’t. And I think I could have coped with… if it had been George’s. But
Felix…”
And upstairs in the study sat that near-complete study on metempsychosis, the
transmigration of souls, that belief that the soul of a man might inhabit a beast, or a beast a
man, and so there was no difference, in the end, in the calibre and quality of those ineffable
things. The outward body was not the mark of the inward being.
Why should a man’s ghost not appear in the shape of a cat, then, especially if his cat
was so dear to him? Or perhaps cat and man are one and the same… Standing there in the
broad daylight it was just a humorous conceit, a foolish piece of academic play. It was some
other cat. I never did get a good look. Some local mog got in through the catflap. In the
bright light of morning, looking at those photos in the kitchen, he almost convinced himself.
He couldn’t even say that the little skittering patch of furry shadow that he had glimpsed
looked much like the sagging, desperate feline clutched in Mrs Bechter’s arms.
But, just as with the lives of mortal men, so the hours of daylight must fail, and
transmigrate into the moonlit dark. Sitting there past evening, the tweaking of aging wiring
making the lightbulbs dance and flicker, Stewart heard the door creak. Craning round in his
chair he saw that swift-footed shape rushing belly to the ground, a streak of sh
adow finding a
hiding place amongst George Bechter’s reference works. The hour had stripped Stewart of his
scepticism. He knew, without being able to account for the knowledge that Felix had come to
visit.
Felix was larger, too. He never saw her clearly, but the sense of a presence in the
room had grown beyond the kitten into the heavy-bodied cat of the photo, at the very least.
Perhaps cats, being the centres of their own worlds, had no sense of their own smallness,
compared to the apes that fed and sheltered them.
21
Short Changes
Adrian Tchaikovsky
“Don’t worry, old girl. I’m still hard at it,” he murmured, and that same feeling of
approval radiated back. He tried to tell himself, I’m going mad, talking to the ghost of a cat,
but it seemed wholly appropriate, somehow. The supernatural had inveigled its way into his
mind in feline form, and he was a cat person. Felix was not a disruptive companion, a ghost
without chains or moans or throwing things about the room. What spirit, after all, would be
quieter and more delicate than a cat’s?
So the night went on, and the next two, as Stewart chased down the loose ends of
George Bechter’s last book, and Felix grew bolder. Her presence was often at his elbow, and
sometimes he would let one hand drift down to stroke that soft, luxuriant fur, momentarily
feeling the hard body beneath as it rose to his touch. Never a purr, though, or any feline
sound, only the soft patter of feet. Felix was a polite, patient spectre.
