Ghost Cats of the South

by Randy Russell

  “Excuse me,” the receptionist interrupted. “Are you Mrs. Mundee, by any chance?”

  “Yes, Mavis Mundee,” she said.

  “I’m so glad I asked.” The receptionist put her hand to her chest. “Mr. Endicott left something for you. It’s in his room.” She stood from behind her desk and smiled at Mavis. “Follow me,” she said.

  Mavis looked at the wooden box on the dresser. It had a domed lid and a crank handle on one side. She knew what it was. Mavis wasn’t born yesterday. A yellow post-it note on the lid had Mavis Mundee written in ballpoint pen by a shaking hand.

  She set the covered plate of Thanksgiving food on the dresser next to the Victrola. She opened the lid.

  “Go ahead,” the receptionist said.

  Mavis cranked the handle and watched the record spin. She raised the chrome arm that held the needle and lowered it onto the record. She stepped back with a hand on her hip to listen. The recording sounded scratchy, and the volume increased and decreased according to the warp in the record. It was a duet, “Shine On, Harvest Moon.” Mavis recognized the song instantly. It was the one that had been playing on her piano since she arrived home from the grocery store yesterday morning.

  The orange-striped cat came in through the window. He jumped to Mr. Endicott’s bed and walked back and forth on the covers, meowing loudly for food.

  The receptionist laughed. “That’s Mr. Endicott’s cat,” she said. “His name is Clyde. He’s trying to sing. Mr. Endicott taught him that.”

  Mavis slipped a small piece of turkey from Mr. Endicott’s Thanksgiving plate and held it out to the cat while the record played. Clyde stopped stalking, walked to her hand, and thrust his whiskers out. He smelled the baked meat, tasting it as cats do, by its scent.

  “Clyde’s just an old stray,” the receptionist told her. “He lives under the window. Mr. Endicott snuck food from the cafeteria to feed the cat for quite some time. He loved that cat. We all pretended not to know, so no one would get into trouble. The center has a no-pet rule.”

  The orange-striped cat took the turkey from Mavis. He carried it to another part of the bed and set it down. Clyde chewed a small piece of the tasty treat with his tail up in the air.

  “I don’t know what we’re going to do with that cat,” the receptionist said. “I guess we’ll have to call Animal Control. That would be better for Clyde than living outdoors in the city. Dogs might catch up with him, you know.”

  “I do know,” Mavis told her. “And I know what we’re going to do.”

  It would serve the grandchildren right if they got scratched once every little while when they were too rambunctious in the house.

  “If you will carry the record player for me, I’ll carry the cat,” Mavis said.

  Once Mavis was back in the car, the receptionist carried the pumpkin pie into the nursing home. “You can pass it around if you want to, dear,” Mavis had told her. “Or take it home for yourself, you’ve been such a help to me and Mr. Endicott.”

  On the way home, with the Victrola in the backseat and the orange cat sitting next to it, Mavis hummed “Shine On, Harvest Moon.” Clyde meowed.

  “Hush, now,” Mavis said. “Guess I raised more cats than children in my day. You be quiet and behave.” Eight hundred dollars and change would buy a lot of cat food, she figured. “And don’t you go running off like you did at his house, you hear? Lord Almighty, you’ll be in trouble but good, you try those cat shenanigans on me.”

  The dishes were done when Mavis came home. Some of the family members were gone. The others had a football game going on TV. Two of the grandchildren were spending the night. The cat kept mostly in the kitchen, where his food and water dishes were. He stayed away from everyone, watching the movements inside the house from under the kitchen table.

  Late that night, when everyone was in bed, Mavis heard the piano. One key at a time, like a cat walking. Not too loud. It was “Shine On, Harvest Moon,” but you could barely recognize it. Mavis didn’t know who was playing it, the cat or Mr. Endicott. It was something nice to listen to, she decided.

  As she fell asleep, she remembered her husband and the way he liked to dance.

  ALEXANDRIA, LOUISIANA

  No-Smoking Cat

  “I felt the cat on my lips this morning,” Alyssa told her coworkers at the zydeco bar. The bar was between Jackson and Lee streets. Alyssa worked nights.

  “Sure,” Muse Hawkins said. “All the ghosts came up this way from Katrina. Cat ghosts especially. They left the coast days before the hurricane hit. Cats know when bad weather is coming.”

  “I don’t think it’s from the hurricane,” she said when Muse came back from the kitchen with a tray of washed glasses for the bar. “I think it’s the cat that died when my uncle did, when he burned the top floor off the house.”

  “Cat might want to stay where it always lived.”

  “It was there when I moved in with my aunt. I’m sure of it, Muse. It doesn’t bother me any. Just sometimes at night, I can feel its whiskers cross my lips. It wakes me up, is all. I feel it on my lips.”

  “You ever seen it yet?”

  “No. My aunt doesn’t see it either, so I guess it’s not really there.”

  The door-to-door missionaries had seen it, though. Alyssa was certain of that. They had looked down in their twin haircuts and seen the ghost.

  They stood together in white shirts and black ties, one of them talking to Alyssa at the front door. The other stared past her at a low place in front of the basement door. His eyes went big, and his face froze. All of a sudden, he turned white as ice.

  He nudged his partner hard and pointed. Then the one who was talking saw it. His eyes got big, too. And he stopped talking. You can’t get a missionary to stop talking once you open the door, but that cat did.

  Alyssa turned around to look behind her. Nothing was there to see. When she turned back to the door, the missionaries were running down the walk to the street. They didn’t say goodbye or leave her a single piece of literature.

  She liked the cat that wasn’t there, except for the whiskers across her lips at night. Maybe she could learn to live with it, now that she knew she wasn’t feeling spiders on her lips. The dead kitty meant no harm, she figured.

  “Wouldn’t bother me any. I don’t go to bed till morning anyway,” Muse said.

  He strapped on his accordion and walked into the corner where the band played. Alyssa picked up her tray of drinks and gumbo and looked around the bar for the people who’d ordered them.

  The missionaries weren’t the only ones. Alyssa’s boyfriend had seen it, too. Alyssa didn’t know that. But even if she had, she wouldn’t have told Muse a thing about it. Her boyfriend was a secret from her aunt. He was a secret from everyone else, for that matter. Gil was a married man. He wouldn’t be for much longer. But until then, Alyssa was discreet. She never mentioned his name.

  Gil had yelped awake in the early morning because he said someone had thrown a glass of water on him. He thought it was Alyssa.

  She’d been dead asleep with the angels, she told him.

  His face was wet, and so was his pillow. He said it wasn’t the least bit funny. A glass was on the nightstand right next to him.

  “You tried to drink it in your sleep,” Alyssa told him. “Then you woke up.”

  “I didn’t throw a glass of water on my own head.”

  “Well, I didn’t either. So there.”

  Gil tossed the wet pillow on the floor. He lay back on the bed with his hands on his chest. He hadn’t told Alyssa the truth. Gil hadn’t been asleep. He had waited for her to fall off, and then he’d lit a cigarette. He was going to use the glass of water as an ashtray. Then someone threw it in his face. The more he thought, the more it seemed like he must have done it himself.

  The reason he didn’t tell Alyssa was that her aunt maintained a strict no-smoking rule for the house. Since the night her husband had fallen asleep smoking and burned the top floor, no smoking of any kind was allowed in the
house. Gil had to sneak up the basement stairs and walk outside to smoke. It was too much trouble to get dressed and go outside to have a cigarette.

  Gil stared up at the darkness for two minutes with no pillow under his head, then got up and left. He wasn’t supposed to be there anyway.

  The night after Alyssa told Muse about the cat on her face, Gil came by the bar for last call. The band was through. The tables were mostly empty. He sat at the bar, showing off to the other waitress. Gil flipped a lit cigarette inside his mouth, held it there with his mouth closed, then flipped it back out again, still burning.

  “It looks like you’re kissing yourself,” the younger waitress said. “It looks like you’re a monkey in the zoo.”

  “Well, now, darling, I’d rather be kissing you.” Gil was drunk.

  He combed his hair like Jerry Lee Lewis. Alyssa could tell from across the room when Gil was drunk. He pushed his hand over his hair, forgot what he was doing, and left it there.

  Alyssa drove Gil home in her car. He was spending the night, it looked like. He smoked in the car, leaning back in the passenger seat with his eyes closed. Alyssa reached across and rolled his window down to let the smoke out.

  “That’s your last one tonight,” she said.

  Stumbling, he followed Alyssa to the door of her aunt’s house. He was singing a song that had been on the radio.

  “And try to be quiet for once, will you? My aunt catches you one time, that will be the last you ever come here. She’ll make sure of that. You’re as drunk as a skunk. Now, hush.”

  When Alyssa got out of bed to visit the bathroom upstairs, Gil rolled onto his side, away from the light. She had turned on the nightstand lamp on her side. She slipped into her chenille robe and left the door open a crack.

  His stomach rumbled. Gil was awake just enough to want a cigarette. The lights came on in the hallway. Gil reached around on the floor looking for his clothes, to find his shirt pocket with the half-pack of cigarettes.

  Gil was dying for a smoke. He’d use his shoe for an ashtray if he had to. He waited until he heard the stairs creak under Alyssa’s feet, then lit one up.

  As soon as his cigarette was lit, the light bulb in Alyssa’s bedside lamp burned out with a tiny snapping sound. The room was dark except for the slice of light spilling through the crack in the door.

  The light in the doorway grew bigger as the door swung slowly open. A tall, dark shadow stood in the door. The shadow wore a funny-looking hat. Gil stared, squinting. It looked like Alyssa with a bunch of hair piled on top of her head. But it was too tall to be Alyssa or her aunt, and too dark. Even in the light of the hallway, the figure looked like charcoal.

  Gil saw a pair of golden eyes on top of the head. They moved. They seemed to have their own source of light. They moved again. The only thing Gil could figure out was that the figure’s hat had eyes. Then he saw its tail move. Gil was mortified.

  The charcoal man had a cat on his head.

  The air in the room smelled like dead fish. The charcoal man walked slowly to the foot of Alyssa’s bed. The door was fully open. Light poured in the room from the hallway, but Gil still couldn’t clearly see the man. Then Gil realized that the man was burnt, and so was the cat. They looked like shadows even in the light. Except for the cat’s yellow eyes, everything was the color of ashes.

  The figure leaned forward from the foot of the bed and slowly raised his arm. Gil was scared stiff. He was unable to react. He wanted to draw up his legs or roll out of bed. The lit cigarette dangled from his lips. The charcoal man raised his arm and wagged a long black finger at Gil, waved it back and forth. Small black flecks like soot fell from the man’s hand.

  Gil finally moved. He jerked the cigarette out of his mouth and flicked it at the man. The cat’s eyes blinked, twin yellow lights going out and coming on again. The charcoal man didn’t react. But his hat did.

  The cat leapt to the bed. It landed in Gil’s lap. It felt like fire.

  Gil wanted to scream. Instead, he inhaled intense heat when he opened his mouth to take a breath. The air was so hot his tongue sizzled like bacon on a griddle. Gil tried to spit his tongue out of his mouth.

  The cat walked up the smoker’s chest. Its paws left fiery prints on Gil’s bare skin. When the cat reached his face, its whiskers touched his mouth. Gil’s lips curled from the heat. He saw the cat briefly. It was black bones and burnt fur. There was no body to it at all. Just eyes, black bones, and burnt fur. Then Gil couldn’t see a thing. His eyes fried shut.

  His Jerry Lee Lewis hair caught flame. It went up like a great ball of fire.

  Gil writhed on the bed. For a few moments, he still had his legs and feet. They soon burned from the top down, like matchsticks. His toes turned bright red. Like ten glowing cigarette butts, his toes went out, a little puff of smoke lifting from each one. Gil was gone now. He was toast.

  Alyssa returned with a glass of water from the bathroom upstairs. If Gil was smoking, she’d throw the water in his face again when he went back to sleep. She turned out the hallway light before pushing the door open. Her bedside lamp lit the room. No one was standing inside.

  Gil had a burnt-down cigarette in his mouth. He was dead asleep, his head propped on the pillow. The red glow of the burning cigarette was almost to the filter. Ashes decorated his chin. They looked like black snowflakes.

  Alyssa threw the water in his face. Gil didn’t wake up.

  His not ever waking up again proved a temporary embarrassment for both Alyssa and Gil’s wife. The coroner said that he died of smoke inhalation, smoke and heat both. The insides of Gil’s mouth were burned.

  “He had this trick he did when he got drunk,” Alyssa told the police. “He’d flip a burning cigarette inside his mouth and hold it there.”

  They wanted to know if Gil was a Satan worshiper or if he belonged to a motorcycle gang. Gil, it turned out, had been recently branded from navel to neck with a series of patterns that looked like a cat’s paw prints.

  Alyssa had never seen the prints before. She told the police she didn’t know a thing about them. It was the truth.

  “He believed in God,” she said. “He never had a motorcycle.”

  Alyssa took the day off work when Gil was buried. She didn’t go to the funeral. It wouldn’t have been right for her to do that, although she wanted to see if they did his hair the way he liked it. She stayed home instead.

  Alyssa cried that Gil was gone. She cried herself to sleep. She woke up when the cat ghost kissed her with its whiskers. It felt like a cool mist on her lips.

  COLUMBIA, SOUTH CAROLINA

  College Cats

  Cats can’t read your mind, but they can read your body. Cats know before you do when you’re almost ready to get something to eat. Cats can see in almost total darkness. They can clearly see you when the lights are out. They know how you behave in your sleep. If you talk in your sleep, your cat is listening to every word, and hearing every breath you take and release. Cats can hear a bat in flight, through a closed window.

  Cats know when you are sick and will lie still with you for hours to offer comfort. Some college coeds say a cat can tell when a girl is pregnant by sitting in her lap and listening to the smallest changes inside her body.

  Sightings of cat ghosts on college campuses are numerous. In women’s college dorms and sorority houses across the South, for instance, students warn each other of the storied Licks You All Over Cat. Apparently a ghost, or perhaps a demon, the cat shows up when a female college student is asleep. Then it starts licking. The harder you sleep, the harder the ghost cat licks.

  Whatever parts of the body it licks will disappear while the coed sleeps.

  If the young lady rouses on the first lick or two, she’s safe. She can rub the spots, and they come back as good as new. But if she doesn’t wake up in time, the student is bound to lose whatever parts of her body have been cat-licked. Because of this, some girls in Southern colleges wear knee socks to bed every night, and long-pants pajamas with paja
ma tops. Some are said to wear hair caps, sleeping masks, and earmuffs to bed even on the warmest of nights.

  The origins of Licks You All Over Cat are impossible to determine. An old campfire tale, perhaps, the story is most often told as a warning to freshmen, away from home for the first time in their lives, not to drink too much. If a girl drinks too much and passes out, she may be entirely gone by morning.

  Gentler cats usually teach their humans to recognize the light touch of whisker kisses, given whenever a human has the audacity to oversleep.

  Whisker kisses feel like spiders walking on your face.

  When cats are happy and content, their whiskers move forward on their faces. When you feel whisker kisses across your cheek or mouth, it’s just your cat making sure that you are all right, that you are breathing normally, that the scent of sickness is not upon your breath. A cat needs to know that you are purposely sleeping in, that you are intent on missing out entirely on the utter joy of the first light of dawn sneaking into the house. Of course, an intellectually curious cat will need to know why.

  It isn’t information, though, that Licks You All Over Cat seeks. It is human flesh.

  There is talk of a University of Georgia student named Elaine. She got drunk and fell asleep on her stomach one night. She woke up in the midst of being licked, but not in time. She had to be transported by helicopter in the middle of the night to a hospital for emergency leg transplants. It is told in whispers that the only legs available at the time belonged to an eighty-year-old man who had died in a nursing home.

  On another campus, the favorite excuse among members of one sorority when they don’t turn in assigned papers on time is to tell the offended professor, “Sorry, cat licked my homework.”

  While Licks You All Over Cat may be entirely a myth, a ghost cat in one of the women’s dorms at the University of South Carolina is not. Coeds who have met the ghost cat often wake up with an “Ouch!” in the middle of its nocturnal visits.