Cat Tales Issue #1

by Steve Vernon

  The hill was kind of a fun place to be, because you could look down from it and see the whole town laid out like a summer picnic. The Funnel House was the highest place in town, next to the old water tower, and that didn’t really count because the house was on a hill, which made it even higher than the tower.

  Folks always expected the tower to be hit by lightning one night, and there were those who swore it had been struck two or three times since Old Man Funnel was hauled away to the county nuthouse.

  “Old Man Funnel was crazier than a black bear with a bee hive jammed up his bung hole,” Jeremy once said. “My Dad told me Old Man Funnel fed his wife and daughter into a meat grinder, because he thought they were getting ready to leave him. He fed them right into a meat grinder, and then he fed the meat to his cat.”

  So I guess maybe you could make a person into hamburger meat, if you tried hard enough.

  * * *

  Being up here on Carpenter’s Hill was a whole lot better than being at home because Dad would only make me slap one more coat of red paint on our old garage, even though the wood was so dry it reminded me of the desert in those cool Clint Eastwood spaghetti western movies, especially because of the way that it sucked up the paint, leaving the whole garage a sort of watered down pink, like cotton candy barf. Dad said it looked like a Mexican cathouse, only when I asked him what he meant by that he got real quiet and changed the subject fast.

  The Funnel House was surrounded by one of those big country hedges, the pricklish kind that snagged you like it was trying to eat you, one tiny nibble at a time, like it was sprouting out a thousand branches full of tiny petrified vampire mosquitoes, and when it came to that house that was where we kids felt safest.

  “Bet you can’t get up there close enough to spit,” said Jeremy to me.

  Jeremy was right. I had learned a long time ago that words like “bet” or “dare” were just another way of asking if you were stupid enough to try, and I wasn’t stupid, that was for sure.

  “So how about you, Charlie?” Jeremy asked. “Are you chicken, or what?”

  Chicken was another word, even bigger than dare or bet. Chicken was the line dragged in the dirt, that always had to be crossed.

  Although I felt a little sorry for Charlie, I was very glad that Jeremy had used the word chicken on Charlie and not on me.

  “I ain’t chicken,” Charlie said, and before you could say spit, the bargain was sealed.

  * * *

  Charlie approached the house cautiously; in the same manner one might approach a bulldog on a chain. He tiptoed up carefully, because you knew that the dog would jump, and you never knew just when that chain might decide to pop, leaving the dog free to rip out your throat and strew your lungs and liver like wrapping paper at a birthday party.

  And of course there was the cat, sitting as always high and watchful in that front porch screened window. A big old scruffy gray tom, with streaks of black and silver depending on how the sun shone upon its fur, and despite the cat’s constant preening it always seemed a little mangy, like the time Jeremy’s Dad had dressed up Jeremy’s drunken uncle Stu in his best suit and had taken him to church. Uncle Stu had snored through the whole entire service, only startling awake as each of the hymns began and then just as quickly settling back down to sleep by the time we reached the second verse.

  I watched Charlie creep onto the porch. I could hear the boards creaking as he crept, and I counted each board as it creaked, one, crrreeeeakkkk, two, crrrrreeeeeaaaakkkk, three, crreeeeaaaakkkk.

  Charlie tapped the outside of the window sill. I knew that the paint would have that awful chalky feeling paint gets after standing too long in the sun; that chalky loose feeling like your skin gets after you’ve received a really bad sunburn.

  “Here kitty, kitty, kitty...,” he began.

  The cat patted the window with one ineffectual paw. It was just so cute and so stupid looking that we all had to giggle.

  Charlie giggled too.

  “Kitty, kitty,” he spluttered through the giggles.

  The cat reared its paw back, like it was about to swat a fly.

  “Oh my God it’s popped its claw,” Charlie comically yelled back to us, still giggling. “It’s going to kill me.”

  Kids always say kill when they have no real idea of what death really is. I knew what death was, because of my Mom and Riley. I also knew there was no way a kid like Charlie or Jeremy would ever know what death really meant, until they had to live through it, just like I had – and that wasn’t something that I would wish on anybody at all.

  “Maybe he likes you,” Jeremy shouted. “Do you smell like cat food?”

  Charlie looked back towards us and grinned.

  As he looked back we really could see the cat popping its claws out further, because we could see the claws, even from where we crouched in the hedges so far away. We could see the cat’s paw, suddenly as big as Mr. Thornton’s coal shovel, we could even see the shadow of the paw falling across Charlie’s cheekbone. I was reminded of my Dad’s fly swatter hand hanging suspended over a mindlessly hand washing fly.

  I was about to scream when, before the breath was even in my lungs, the cat slammed its paw against the screen.

  The screen made a sound like a big steel guitar being slammed by an open palm as the cat shot its claws out like the tentacles of a hydra plant, shooting out like that squirt of medicine old Doc Hawcomber used to shoot out of his hypodermic needle before giving it to you in the arm. Then the cat had hold of Charlie, catching hold of him and hauling him straight through the screen just as slick as April flood water sliding through the gullet of an iron sluice gate.

  Then there was blood all over, blood that slowly soaked into the shakes and shutters and screening of the house. We watched it and thought how it should have made some sort of noisy sucking sound, like the sound that bath water makes when it runs down the drain, but it didn’t make any kind of sound at all. It was as silent as the sun drying paint, and maybe that made it all the more scarier, and then the cat began daintily lapping at what was left of Charlie.

  Old Mr. Chizmar would have known what to call what was left of Charlie. He would have called it ground chuck, like he was making a bad joke, only nobody was laughing.

  Then that cat looked up in midlap, and it stared right across the barren front yard, out to where I was crouching with my friends in the wicked thorn hedge.

  I heard a sound in my head and it was bigger than I bet you. The sound was even bigger than chicken; and then all at once I felt as if I really wanted to go up to that porch, to see just what exactly had happened to Charlie, for no particular reason at all, just because I’d heard that sound somewhere back in my head.

  And as I headed towards the porch I wondered how many of the other kids had also heard that sound. How many of them were following me up to the porch.

  I had a feeling it was all of them were walking right up to that porch, following that cat’s eerie call; only something got in my way, like an invisible knee high push, shoving me back towards the safety of the hedge, and all those kids who were following me turned back as well.

  I shook my head, like I had fallen off my bike, and then I realized what I’d been about to do. I had been just about ready to walk right up on to that porch, right up to that screen window and let that cat grab hold of me and yank me straight through the screening, just like Charlie.

  Then I heard something else.

  We all heard it.

  We heard barking.

  All of swear we heard barking, like it was coming from a long way off, from out of a cave, or a well hole, or a sewer pipe - and I kept feeling that herding motion at my knees, like I was being shepherded to safety.

  The cat just sat there in the window, glaring and hissing as the barking grew louder and I shuddered to think of what might have happened had I walked on up to that porch.

  And then I realized who’d saved me.

  It was Riley.

  “Get him Riley,” I sh
outed. “Get that damned old cat.”

  Any other time the other kids might have looked around nervously to see if any adults were listening to hear one of us swear, but this time when I swore it was like when Charlie talked about owl guts, and they all took up the chant like it was some kind of crazy skipping game.

  “Get him Riley, get that damned old cat.” We started shouting.

  All of us stood in the hedges like soldiers in a trench, shouting like our words were hand grenades and bullets, but it was the barking that was doing all the damage.

  The barking got so loud it sounded like a big old timber truck barreling down on us, and then the cat’s eyes abruptly widened, and it screeched as if somebody had thrown a bucket of cold scrub water on its back, and then it just plain disappeared.

  Jeremy swears he saw it jump down from the window sill in to the house, but I know better than that. I think Jeremy is only kidding himself, so that someday he’ll stop peeing the bed at night when he dreams about what happened to his best friend Charlie.

  The cat just up and disappeared, like it was some kind of a ghost, or maybe worse.

  There was a bit more barking after that, and then from out of nowhere, directly in front of the front porch window, a high arc of yellow fluid sprinkled out from midair, landing with a satisfying sizzle-hiss on the front porch floor boards, like a mouth full of spit hitting onto a red hot fry pan.

  And I saw those porch floorboards trying to soak that yellow fluid up. Only they couldn’t. I saw those porch floorboards hacking that ghost-Riley pee back out, like a cat might hack up a fur ball, only those floorboards just couldn’t seem to lose the tattletale stain. The territory had been firmly staked out.

  “Piss on you, housecat” I hissed. “Piss on you in pussycat hell.”

  * * *

  I told my Dad this story just last week, just before he took his long walk up the side of Carpenter’s Hill with his bouquet of quiet red roses.

  It had taken me more than two months to finally work up the nerve to tell him.

  By then the whole town had finished searching for little Charlie Roundbert, and had decided that he had probably wandered off somewhere and was eaten by a wild creature, or way laid by a wandering tramp which was sad to think of it, but it was a whole lot better than knowing the truth.

  I told my Dad the whole story, knowing full well that he likely wouldn’t believe a word of it, but he only listened quietly and repeated his warning about the swamp behind the school.

  I guess he didn’t figure I needed any warning about the Funnel House.

  Then he stepped outside and closed the door and walked up the hill to where my Mom slept, and after that I found out that he’d walked the rest of the way up Carpenter’s Hill to where the old Funnel House stood.

  He brought his camera, and while he was up there he emptied a whole roll of film.

  Two weeks later, after the film came back to Lalonde’s Drugstore, my Dad showed it to me.

  The cat was in the window, like I’d expected it to be, but sitting on the porch, right where someone or something would be able to keep careful watch on the cat was a well chewed rubber ball, and a single sun dried blood red rose.

  The End

  About the Author

  Steve Vernon is a storyteller. The man was born with a campfire burning at his feet. The word "boring" does not exist in this man's vocabulary - unless he's maybe talking about termites or ice augers.

  That’s all that Steve Vernon will say about himself – on account of Steve Vernon abso-freaking HATES talking about himself in the third person.

  But I’ll tell you what.

  If you LIKED the book that you just read drop me a Tweet on Twitter – @StephenVernon - and yes, old farts like me ACTUALLY do know how to twitter – and let me know how you liked the book – and I’d be truly grateful.

  If you feel strongly enough to write a review, that’s fine too. Reviews are ALWAYS appreciated – but I know that not all of you folks are into writing big long funky old reviews – so just shout the book out just any way that you can – because I can use ALL the help I can get.

  Lastly, if you REALLY enjoyed this book – then go and buy another of my books. With over forty e-books independently published, you are BOUND to find something that you like.

  Also By Steve Vernon

  PUBLISHED BY NIMBUS PUBLISHING

  Haunted Harbours: Ghost Stories from Old Nova Scotia

  Wicked Woods: Ghost Stories from Old New Brunswick

  Halifax Haunts: Exploring the Cities Spookiest Spaces

  Maritime Monsters: A Field Guide

  Sinking Deeper – Or, My Questionable (Possibly Heroic) Decision to Invent a Sea Monster

  The Lunenburg Werewolf and Other Stories of the Supernatural

  Maritime Murder: Deadly Crimes From the Buried Past

  PUBLISHED INDEPENDENTLY

  Tatterdemon: A Novel of Scarecrow Terror

  Sudden Death Overtime: A Story of Hockey and Vampires

  Rueful Regret

  Shotgun Christmas

  Sea Tales

  Trolling Lures

  The Weird Ones

  Tales from the Tangled Wood

  Two Fisted Nasty

  A Blurt in Time: The Tale of a Time Traveling Toilet

  Big Hairy Deal

  Bigfoot Tracks

  Devil Tree

  Do-Overs and Detours

  Gypsy Blood

  Hammurabi Road

  Kelpie Dreams

  Kelpie Christmas

  Kelpie Snow

  Long Horn, Big Shaggy: A Tale of Wild West Terror and Reanimated Buffalo

  Midnight Hat Trick

  Not Just Any Old Ghost Story

  Nothing to Lose: The Adventures of Captain Nothing Volume 1

  Nothing Down: The Adventures of Captain Nothing Volume 2

  A Hatful of Stories

  Bad Valentines

  Bad Valentines 2

  Uncle Bob’s Red Flannel Bible Camp – The Book of Genesis

  Uncle Bob’s Red Flannel Bible Camp – The Book of Exodus

  THE CAT’S MEOW

  * * *

  By Jamie Ferguson

  * * *

  Copyright © 2016 by Jamie Ferguson

  * * *

  The Cat’s Meow is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual events, places, incidents, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  * * *

  All rights reserved.

  * * *

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  * * *

  Published by Blackbird Publishing, LLC

  www.blackbirdpublishing.com

  * * *

  Cover design: Jamie Ferguson

  Cover image: iStockPhoto

  The Cat’s Meow

  Clifford hoped he hadn’t heard the alien ambassador correctly. Unfortunately, he knew he had. Clifford had lived on the research base on Tziuna, the Ziztti’s planet, since the base had opened, and had spent years before that studying the Ziztti language, so he knew the language almost as well as if he’d been born on their planet. Or at least he knew everything he and his fellow xenolinguists had deciphered since first contact between the two species, almost seven years ago. Assuming they’d deciphered everything correctly.

  Surely the Ziztti weren’t actually giving him a pet? An alien pet?

  Clifford and Virruni, his Ziztti counterpart, sat in Clifford’s quarters on Tziuna. Ziztti culture was centered around eating and drinking and socializing, so everyone who interacted with them on a regular basis had living quarters with a large, open room designed for entertaining. The rooms were configured with recording equipment so that interspecies communication issues could be reviewed and studied. Recording everything resulted in the occasional complication, like the first time Sheila had spent the night. But at moments like this it w
as a relief to know you could review the conversation later. Although Clifford had a feeling he might end up watching the recordings with some type of pet.

  He squirmed in his oversized purple chair in an attempt to sit upright. The chairs were essentially giant purple beanbags, large enough to hold the massive bulk of the Ziztti, but a bit overwhelming for the average human. They were quite comfortable if you wanted to take a nap, but were somewhat of a challenge to sit in when you were trying to stay focused on every nuance of an alien ambassador’s pronunciation or intonation or body language.

  Like right now.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” Clifford said. ‘Sir’ wasn’t really quite the correct term for one of the semi-androgynous Ziztti, but, as with many words, he’d found he’d had to settle for a close approximation. “Did you say a...pet?”

  Virruni made the Ziztti equivalent of a smile – his mouth widened, his large, round nose twitched, and his bushy eyebrows wiggled. He clasped all four of his hands together, resting them on his large, round stomach. Each hand had four fingers, but unlike human fingers they were spread out in such a way that they worked more like two fingers and two thumbs. They were covered with soft, downy, white fur that slowly changed color as it ran up his arms until it was the warm honey-brown shade that covered the rest of his body, or at least that covered the parts that weren’t hidden by his vibrant purple and red robes.

  “You are exited, are you?” Virruni said. He made a soft snorting sound. His cologne was made from a plant he called sanittini; it smelled almost like cloves and orange. The vibrant, energetic scent fit Virruni. “My apologies, Mister Clifford. I meant excited.”