by John Saul
Running again, her heart pounding, her lungs heaving, she tried to escape the terrors that surrounded her in the darkness. Now the night took on the quality of a nightmare. Her feet felt sluggish, as if bogged down in thick mud, and the road itself threatened to mire her. A moan escaped her lips, nearly echoing the moans that had come from the forest earlier.
Then, as she came to the bend in the road, she saw it.
The house at the Crossing, light pouring from its windows, washing away the darkness. Angel hurled herself toward the light, veering across the road and onto the small expanse of lawn that wrapped around the house.
The sounds began to die away.
And then, once more, silence.
A silence that was suddenly broken by laughter.
Loud, raucous laughter, rolling out of the forest and across the road and the lawn. Angel felt it crashing against her as she stood on the front porch.
Zack. Now she understood what had happened. Heather and her friend must have told Zack what had happened. Now he was laughing.
Laughing exactly as they had laughed earlier.
Struggling against the tears that now threatened to overwhelm her, she turned her back on the mocking laughter, slipped through the front door, and headed for the stairs, wanting nothing more than the refuge of her room, where she might blot out the laughter still ringing in her ears.
But as she passed the living room, her mother said, “Angel? Are you all right?”
She hesitated, wanting to tell her mother what had happened, what Zack Fletcher had done. But remembering what had happened when she’d told her mother about her father coming into her room that night, she changed her mind. Besides, if her mother believed her, she would tell her aunt Joni, and her aunt would talk to Zack, and . . .
And everything would be even worse than it was right now.
“I’m okay,” she said. “I’m just going upstairs to finish my homework.”
“All right,” her mother said. “I’ll come in and say good night in a little while.”
Upstairs, Angel washed the blood and grime off her scraped palms, winced as she dabbed the cuts with iodine, then went to her room. Instead of turning on the light, however, she went to the window and peered out into the darkness. The moon was obliterated now, and it was like looking into the blackness of eternity itself. For a moment she wondered what it would be like to simply disappear into that blackness, to float forever in silence and nothingness.
At last she drew the curtains and turned away from the window, but still didn’t turn on the light. Instead she took off her clothes in darkness, and in darkness she slipped into her bed.
When her mother came in to kiss her good-night an hour later, Angel pretended to be asleep, and carefully kept her injuries hidden beneath her blankets.
Zack Fletcher was still two blocks from home when he heard a faint rustling sound, just like the sound he himself had made half an hour ago when he, Chad, and Jared caught up with Angel Sullivan as she walked home, making noises in the woods and scaring her so badly she’d started running. So he ignored it as he continued to walk along Haverford Street.
The sounds continued, a distinct rustling in the leaves off to the left, and finally, when he’d passed two more houses, Zack stopped.
So did the sound of rustling leaves.
He resumed walking again.
The sounds began again too.
Zack stopped again. “Okay, Chad!” he called out. “You can come out now—I know it’s you.”
Nothing.
He began walking again, and the sounds started up again, keeping pace with him.
“Come on, Chad!” he shouted. “You’re not scaring me!” But even as he spoke the words, his voice betrayed the lie.
He walked faster, and heard the sound again.
Something, or someone, was moving along next to him, keeping pace with him.
But why couldn’t he see them? There were lights on in the houses along Haverford Street, and porch lights were on, and streetlights. Yet he couldn’t make out whoever was following him.
Then, as he crossed Prospect Street, he caught a flash of movement.
A cat! Nothing but a stupid cat, like the one that was always hanging around with Angel. His fright vanishing, Zack stepped up onto the curb and started down the last block.
Now the cat was moving alongside him, making no effort at all to stay out of sight.
But strangely, though he could see the cat clearly, moving over the leaves that had fallen from the huge canopy of branches that spread over the lawns along Haverford Street, it was no longer making any sound at all.
The rustling had stopped.
It was as if the cat were somehow floating over the leaves, not even disturbing them.
He stopped.
So did the cat, turning to face him.
Zack took a step toward it. “Shoo!”
The cat only crouched, its tail twitching.
“Stupid cat,” Zack said. “Get out of here!” He charged toward it, raising his arms and waving them.
But instead of springing off into the darkness, the cat launched itself straight at him, and a second later Zack screamed as he felt the claws sink deep into the flesh of his face. As his howl of agony rose, the cat dropped away, and as Zack clutched at his face, it darted off, to disappear silently into the shadows.
His face burning with pain and his eyes stinging with tears, Zack ran the rest of the way home, charging up onto the front porch of his house. Opening the door, he lurched inside, then slammed it shut behind him, leaning against it for a moment as he caught his breath.
“Zack?” he heard his mother say from the living room. “Honey, everything OK?”
Feeling tears streaming down his cheeks, Zack moved toward the living room. “It was a cat,” he said, his voice quavering. “Angel’s cat! It tried to kill me!”
Joni Fletcher gazed at her son, whose face was twisted into a mask of fear and pain. “What?” she asked, rising to her feet. “What cat? What do mean, it attacked you?”
“My face,” Zack wailed. “It practically ripped my cheeks off!”
His mother was looking at him with bewilderment. “Honey, what are you talking about? There’s nothing wrong with your face.”
Zack put his hand to his cheek.
The stinging was gone.
He looked at his fingers.
No blood.
Turning, he looked in the mirror that hung on the wall over the table by the front door.
His face looked perfectly normal—not even a scratch, let alone the deep slashes that should have been there, given how agonizing the pain had been when the animal’s claws had sunk into his skin.
He gently touched his cheek with his forefinger.
Nothing—no pain at all.
But a few minutes ago—
He turned back to the living room, where his father had joined his mother, both of them on their feet, looking at him uncertainly. “I’m not lying,” Zack said, his voice uneven. “It happened right down at the end of the block.”
“What happened?” Ed Fletcher asked.
As best he could, Zack recounted everything from the moment he’d first heard the sound of rustling leaves as he was walking home to when the cat launched itself at his face.
“You’re sure it actually attacked you?” Ed Fletcher asked when his son was finished.
“I’m telling you, Dad!” Zack exclaimed, his voice rising in response to the doubt in his father’s voice. “It tried to kill me!”
“Well, it certainly didn’t succeed, did it? Seems like it did a better job of scaring you than it did of hurting you.”
Zack’s eyes narrowed and he turned truculent. “You don’t believe me.”
Ed Fletcher spread his hands as if to ward off his son’s angry words. “I’m not saying nothing happened—I’m just saying it doesn’t seem to be as bad as you think it was.”
“And even if a cat did attack you, why would you think it was Angel
’s?” his mother asked. “They don’t even have a cat. Marty’s allergic.”
“As allergic as he is to work?” Ed Fletcher interjected, engendering a dark look from his wife.
“It’s Angel’s,” Zack said. “It follows her everywhere. It’s all black and—”
“You’re claiming you recognized a black cat at night?” Ed Fletcher broke in.
“I did!” Zack was nearly shouting now.
“All right, all right!” Ed said, once more raising his hands as if to fend off his son’s anger. “I’m just not sure I would have even seen it, that’s all.”
“You’d have seen this one,” Zack said. “It’s huge, and its eyes were glowing, and—”
“All right, that’s enough,” Ed Fletcher said, his tone imparting his doubt as much as his words. “Even if we agree that this cat attacked you—which, frankly, I doubt—I don’t see why you think it belongs to Angel. They don’t even live around here, and—”
“It followed me!” Zack blurted, before considering the implication of his words. But it was too late.
“Followed you from where?” Ed Fletcher asked. “Is there something you’re not telling us, Zack?”
“No, I—” Zack began, but his father didn’t let him finish.
“Why don’t you tell us exactly where you were tonight, and what you were doing?”
“I was just hangin’ out with Chad and Jared and Heather! And Angel was there, and her stupid cat, and—”
“Why do you keep saying it was Angel’s cat?” Joni broke in.
“Because it’s always with her! I’m tellin’ you—”
“I’m going to call Myra,” Joni said.
She picked up the phone, dialed, and when she hung up a few minutes later, her eyes had taken on the same look as her husband’s.
“Zack, the Sullivans don’t have a cat,” she said to her son. “So whatever happened tonight had nothing to do with your cousin. Now, what really happened?”
Seething, but knowing there was no use arguing with both his parents, Zack turned away. “Nothing,” he said. “Nothing happened, all right?”
He headed up the stairs, and when his mother called after him, he didn’t answer. A moment later he was in his room, slamming the door shut behind him.
As he got ready to go to bed, Chad Jackson was still laughing about the sight of Angel Sullivan running terrified through the night. For him, the best part was when she’d tripped and fallen on her face. He could still remember how much it had hurt two years ago when his bike skidded out of control, across the asphalt in the street right outside. He’d had scabs for weeks, and when his mother insisted on putting iodine on the scrapes—
He winced even now, just thinking about it.
Leaving his clothes piled in a heap on the floor, he climbed into bed and was just reaching for the light switch when his eyes fell on his backpack, full of textbooks, and he remembered the math homework he hadn’t done.
Well, no point in doing it now—he’d either do it in the morning or make Seth Baker let him copy his. Too bad Seth hadn’t been with Angel when they followed her, moving through the woods, where she couldn’t see them, making noises. The only thing that would have been better was if Seth had been there too, getting so scared he’d wet his pants.
That would have made it perfect—if they’d been able to figure out a way to give Seth as good a scare as they’d given Angel.
Angel—what a stupid name.
A stupid name for a fat, ugly, stupid girl.
So stupid she even liked Seth Baker!
And stupid enough to fall for the sounds they’d been making too.
Grinning, Chad softly repeated the hooting sound he’d made in the woods that night. It didn’t actually sound like an owl—at least not any he’d ever heard—but it had been good enough to send Angel running for home. He was about to repeat it, and improve on it, when he heard something.
Something from outside the room.
He listened, and heard nothing.
He decided he must have been wrong.
Relaxing, Chad reached for the lamp on the bedside table.
The sound came again, but this time he recognized it. It was the same sound he’d just made.
He lay still, not even breathing, his hand hovering near the lamp.
The sound came again.
What was it? An owl?
But it didn’t sound like an owl—it sounded like him trying to sound like an owl!
What—
And then he knew! It had to be Jared—or maybe Zack—playing a trick on him.
Or maybe signaling him to come out! He and Jared had snuck out at least half a dozen times last summer and never come close to getting caught. Chad slid out of bed and pulled on his clothes. Going to the door of his room, he listened, then opened it a crack and listened again.
The hall outside was dark and silent, but he could hear his father snoring even through the door to his parents’ bedroom.
Closing his door, Chad went to the window, unlatched it, and raised the lower casement. It creaked a little, and the counterweights in the frame rattled, but he knew that even if his mother was awake, she’d have her earplugs in to cut down the racket of his dad’s snoring.
“Jared?” he called softly.
There was no reply, except for the same strange hooting sound that had brought him to the window. A cold draft of air flowed in the open window, a draft unlike anything Chad had felt before. The cold seemed to reach inside him, and for a terrible instant he had the feeling he was dying.
Holding perfectly still, he strained his eyes and ears, searching for the source of the sound that had caused him to suddenly freeze.
But he saw nothing, and a moment later realized he heard nothing either—not even the last of the crickets and frogs that were so loud during the summer that they kept him awake, and which he’d still heard outside when he’d gone to bed tonight.
Now the night was utterly silent.
Why? What had silenced the frogs and crickets?
He listened with concentration, and then, from no more than a few feet away, was startled by a loud screeching.
Chad jumped, banging his head against the frame of the open window.
What was it?
An owl? A cat?
He turned in the direction from which the sound had come, and at first saw nothing. But then he saw something glimmering in the blackness, barely visible.
Chad’s pulse quickened as he strained to see better.
The glimmer turned to a glow, and then the glow came into focus.
Eyes.
Two darkly glowing eyes, the pupils huge, were peering at him from a branch of the tree that was just far enough away to be out of his reach.
An owl. That’s what it had to be—a screech owl! He’d imitated it better than he thought!
Chad waved his arms toward it, certain it would leap from the branch and fly away. But instead of seeing an owl burst out of the tree’s canopy in startled flight, something as black as the night outside came through the window. For a terrible instant Chad felt as if the darkness itself was reaching for him, but a fraction of a second later he knew he was wrong.
A cat!
A black cat, with a single white blaze in the middle of its chest.
Angel’s cat!
Claws that felt like acid-tipped scalpel blades suddenly slashed deep into the bare flesh of his shoulders, and teeth sank into his neck.
A scream of pain and shock choking in his throat, Chad lurched backward, tumbling to the bedroom floor. He tried to get his hands on it to tear it away from his throat before it killed him, but before he could, the cat was gone.
Gone so quickly and so completely that for several seconds Chad wondered if anything had actually happened at all. But then the pain of the cat’s claws sinking into the flesh of his shoulders began to burn, and he pressed his hands against his neck, terrified that the animal might have torn open his throat. Stumbling from his bedroom down the hall
to the bathroom, he turned on the cold water and began washing his neck and shoulders even before turning the light on.
The coolness of the water soothed the burning of his wounds, and after using a washcloth to wipe most of the water away, he turned on the light and looked at his reflection in the mirror.
Nothing.
Not a cut anywhere—not even a scratch!
Then, as he stared at his image in the mirror, he saw it.
The cat’s face, its lips pulled back to show its teeth, looming behind him, just over his right shoulder.
Spinning around, Chad raised his arms to fend off the cat’s attack once more.
And again he saw nothing.
For almost a full minute he stood trembling in the bathroom, his heart racing, too terrified even to turn off the light and go back to his room.
He searched the bathroom then, even looking in the shower and behind the old-fashioned claw-foot bathtub, for any sign of the cat, but the cat had vanished even faster than it had vanished from the tree outside.
If it had been in the bathroom at all.
As his heart finally slowed back to normal, Chad told himself he couldn’t have seen anything in the mirror, that it had to have been his imagination playing tricks on him.
But what about before, when he was peering out the open window and the cat had attacked him and he’d felt the pain of its claws sinking into his flesh?
Could he have imagined that too?
How?
How had it happened?
Maybe nothing had happened.
Maybe he had imagined it all.
But when he went back to his bedroom, Chad left the light on in the bathroom, and when he went to sleep, he left the light on in his room too.
The black cat slipped through the night like a wraith, moving silently in the darkness, no sound at all betraying its presence. Rather, it was the silence itself that signaled every living thing within its reach that something was wrong.
