The Valancourt Book of World Horror Stories
Page 19
So I drove slowly, scanning the roadside where the grass was already withered because autumn was on its way. And I saw them: a cat’s eyes, like small glowing lamps in the falling dusk.
What was perhaps more frustrating: the cat saw me too. It sat motionless waiting along the side of the road and watched as I approached.
And this is what’s so infinitely difficult to accept: I wasn’t careless and I wasn’t speeding, although naturally I wanted to get home, plop down on the couch, and close my eyes while Matt poured me a glass of port.
In the end, the animal did it itself. And there was nothing I could do.
One moment it was still there. I saw the ears – a little too short – and the tail, which looked as if it had once been longer and had an odd kink in it. I even imagine seeing the whiskers, a blend of black and white, although that is highly unlikely. But in my head, where I keep the memory, I do see them.
I don’t think I was going much faster than 50 km per hour. Maybe even 30. But in the split second it should have taken to pass the animal, it moved.
I saw it. A quick leap, perfectly timed as if the cat had chosen its own death – but animals can’t do that – and it stood right in front of me on the road.
I braked with everything I had. The wheels jammed, screeching over the cobblestones. There was a ‘thump’ that made me queasy. Then: silence.
‘Oh God,’ I whispered to the dashboard. ‘Oh shit.’
My hands were trembling when I switched off the ignition. They were shaking when I opened the door. The warning sound began to beep, but I left the lights on while I let my feet drop onto the deck of the tossing ship the road seemed to have turned into.
I stumbled to the front of my car and knelt down beside the cat. The short ears with a piece missing, the tattered fur and the half-black, half-white whiskers. Mouth open – was the lower jaw shorter than the upper? Blood was streaming out, and the head had been scraped by the pavement. And that was the good scenario because it could also have a skull fracture. Its paw lay at an odd angle, definitely broken. And still more blood, which looked brown rather than red in the glow of the headlights.
Its eyes were open, but those weren’t damaged. The pupils were enormous and hardly left room for the yellow-green reflection around them. And then it looked at me. Bleeding and dying, the cat looked at me.
Was there reproach? They say animals can’t feel human emotions, but if elephants can mourn and dolphins can love, why couldn’t a cat blame you for what you’ve done?
‘Stupid cat. Why didn’t you just stay put?’ I whispered. I brought my trembling finger to its head and petted carefully between its ears. ‘I’m so sorry.’
Blood stuck to my fingers and while I tried to think of where to wipe it off, I noticed the thin yellow collar around the animal’s neck. The little silver address tag.
Of course. The accident hadn’t only affected the cat that was now lying here dying in the street. Somewhere there was an owner, maybe a whole family, who would be devastated by the loss of this animal. My fault.
But I’ve never walked away from my responsibilities. Not even now, with a stranger’s voice in my head and glass splinters from an attic window at my feet.
I reached for the collar to remove the tag. I must have been hurting the cat because it suddenly lashed out and drove sharp claws deep into my wrist.
‘Shit!’
Lightning fast I pulled my hand back. The cat had stuck its nails deep in my skin and thick drops of blood dripped down and mixed with the even thicker cat blood. Just what I needed, I thought. I brought my wrist to my mouth and sucked. It was just what I deserved.
Just pick it up, very carefully, and don’t look at the nauseating spots left behind on the road. There was a grocery box in the trunk of my car and I put the cat in it, after which I set it next to me on the passenger seat. I wished I could talk to it because it must be suffering horrible pain. Fortunately it didn’t scratch me again.
It lived on Appelstraat. Number 79.
How do you do that kind of thing? What do you say when you ring someone’s doorbell with their housemate dying in a cardboard box? And you’re the one responsible?
The garden path that would bring me to the front door of number 79 seemed endless. It was a rather small detached house that screamed ‘overdue maintenance’. Roof shingles that had slid into the gutter, chipping paint on the window frames, a break in the glass of a skylight high above, a wild confusion of bushes in the garden. A bramble caught its thorns in my jacket as if it wanted to prevent me from reaching the front door. And then there was the cat, motionless in its little cardboard box, looking at me with those reflecting eyes. The deep scratch on my wrist throbbed and ached as only cat scratches can.
What was I going to say in one minute,
fifty seconds,
thirty seconds,
ten . . . ?
‘Good evening. I’m terribly sorry, but . . .’
It was not a good evening, and it was about to get much worse.
‘Hello. I realize this comes as a shock, but I accidentally . . .’
What good would ‘accidentally’ do them?
‘Your cat suddenly jumped in front of my car and I didn’t have time to brake. I . . .’
That sounded as though I was blaming the cat.
When I had finally reached the end of the path and put my finger on the doorbell, my brain was nearly bursting with possible apologies and tears that I kept holding back in my weary head.
And then the door opened, and I suddenly realized there was an even worse possible scenario than the one about the inconsolable toddler who’d lost her dearest pet: that of a lonely old granny who had no one else but the cat, which she loved like a child.
And I had killed that child.
So when I saw the thin, gray tufts of hair on the skull of the woman who opened the door, the wrinkles like crinkled paper, the liver spots on her forehead, one of those synthetic beige skirts that no one under eighty dares to wear anymore, and the walker with which she had patiently made her way to the door, I could hardly get a word out. I began to sniffle helplessly and held the box out towards her. ‘I’m so sorry . . .’
That was the moment when the woman should have broken out crying herself, or gotten angry. The moment when she should have chased me off with her cane or had a heart attack from the shock. But none of that happened.
She took the box from me calmly and looked inside with a kind of absent curiosity.
That was the moment when I really should have known that something wasn’t right. And I don’t mean because of the accident or the dying animal in the box. Something was off. But I was tired and shaken up and didn’t notice it.
She bent over the box, shaking her head, and stuck her hand inside. ‘What have you been up to, Dante? What on earth got into that silly cat head of yours!’
I sniffled. ‘I’m so terribly sorry, ma’am. I couldn’t avoid him and I hit him with my car. I’m well insured, we can call the vet. I want to take care of everything.’
She looked up. ‘Aw, what a nice girl you are. He does that sometimes, you know? He just takes off and does stupid things. I’m always telling him: don’t do that, be careful now, but he is so stubborn.’
She turned her attention back to the animal in the box. ‘Shame on you, Dante! Now look what you’ve done. You’ve made this nice girl cry. Shame, shame, shame.’
I tried again. ‘Shall we drive together to a vet’s office? I’ll gladly pay.’
But the woman shook her head resolutely. Maybe she wasn’t as fragile as I had initially thought. ‘Not necessary, dearie, not necessary. He’s a tough one, my Dante.’ A sharp look at me. ‘But you look a little peaked. I bet you’d like a cup of tea. For the fright.’
I didn’t want any tea. What I wanted was to go home and take a bath and forget all of this ha
d happened. But how could I tell her no?
‘I never hear from my children, you see? And Dante here isn’t very talkative either. A nice cup of tea would do us both good,’ she went on.
I hesitated. My sense of guilt was huge, but so was my headache. And I wanted to say no, I wanted . . .
‘It’s just the two of us, my husband and I, you see. And Dante of course. Oh, and I mustn’t forget Frits. That’s our canary, but he doesn’t really sing anymore. Too old, I think. Just like my husband. He’s ninety-four. He’s not so well anymore. We used to play little games, he and I. We would play Halma or Parcheesi on Sunday evenings. It’s the Parkinson’s. He knocks all the little pieces over. That’s how it goes, he can’t help it of course, but still . . .’
‘I’m sorry, ma’am,’ I managed to say. ‘Matt, my boyfriend, will wonder where I am, so if you’re sure there’s nothing more I can do for you . . .’
It went totally quiet and I heard only the rasping sound of a dying cat from the box that she had placed on her walker.
She looked at me with an unspoken accusation in her eyes and nodded. ‘If you’d rather go home, dearie, then I’ll manage on my own. Alone.’
I know. I may have turned my back a million times on my parents’ faith and decided that whatever is up there ruling the universe, in any case it’s not the sexist, unimaginative, and vengeful old man my parents’ church made it out to be. But I’ll never be able to shake off that impression. Not entirely.
The church had gotten its claws of sin, duty, and an endless awareness of not-enough in me when I was so small that I didn’t know the difference between the words ‘mercy’ and ‘jersey’. Now that I’m an adult, my only defense is my refusal to let myself be controlled by it.
And Matt.
I would go crazy if Matt weren’t there to scrape the burning coals off my head every so often.
‘I should have stayed,’ I told him later that evening. ‘I mean: why couldn’t I bring myself to drink a cup of tea with her? I killed her cat! And now she’s there all alone with her husband, who can’t do anything either. Did I already tell you that he’s 94, her husband? That means he must have fought in the war, that he saw the Wall go up and then fall again, that he saw radio and the newspaper make way for television and the internet. Everything!’
‘Impressive,’ Matt said calmly. He bent over and refilled my glass with port. Tawny and fairly old, just the way I like it. He has always known exactly what I needed, and thus that tonight a cheapie from the supermarket wasn’t going to cut it.
‘She used to play games with him. But now his Parkinson’s is so bad that he always knocks the pieces over, she says. Is that our future? Together in a dilapidated little house on the edge of the inhabited world with a canary and a cat? And then I come along and destroy even that.’
Matt came and sat beside me, and through the soft fabric of my bathrobe I felt the warmth of his thigh against mine. Upon seeing the look in my eyes when I came home, he had first run a full bath and then guided me with a gentle hand towards the bathroom to relax in the warmth of the water. Now he listened to me as only he can: sweet, loving, clever, and above all without judgment.
His hand glided towards my leg, pushed the flap of the robe aside and caressed my warm skin. The sudden intimacy brought me almost to tears because I knew that she – that little old woman – that maybe she had also had it once, but no longer.
He saw it, stopped, and brought his hand to my face. He stroked my cheek with the back side of his ring finger. I felt the callus there and the hardness of his knuckle and sighed. ‘Sorry, I’m rattling on.’
‘And that’s exactly why I love you so much,’ he muttered. ‘Because things like that affect you. That makes you unique.’ He grinned. ‘Tender Tara.’
He always used that pet name when I got emotional over abandoned shelter dogs, refugees in trouble on the borders of Europe, or yet another cutback in social services under the guise of ‘efficiency’. I hate that no one calls it by its right name: economizing on the weakest.
‘I feel guilty,’ I whispered. ‘Dante . . .’ I saw the lack of understanding in his eyes and quickly added: ‘The cat. I hit him hard, Matt, really hard. All that blood! And she totally didn’t get what was really happening. She thought he’d just get better. That when she wakes up tomorrow and goes to the kitchen, then . . .’
‘A person can’t do everything,’ Matt said, and he kissed my forehead softly. ‘Not even my Tender Tara.’
His fingers stroked my hair. ‘Otherwise just go back later and check on how the beast is. Then you can still have a cup of tea with her and maybe even play a game. She’ll like that better than if you had stayed this evening.’
He was right, of course. That’s how Matt is. He always knows how to guide me so that it feels good and safe.
So when his lips touched mine, I finally dared to surrender myself. I kissed him back and welcomed the warmth. I had a plan. And everything would work out fine in the end.
Naive, right? To think you can make up for taking a life with a belated cup of tea?
I should have known it wouldn’t be so easy. Especially when the night, which had begun in a heated intoxication of oblivion, passed into something else.
I hadn’t yet slipped deep into the sleep I so desperately needed when it began. An endless falling as images flashed by: the dark cobblestone road, only lit up here and there by a single nostalgic streetlamp, the glowing eyes on the side of the road, the screeching brakes that drowned out the sound of my car stereo. The cat’s mirror eyes that wanted to tell me something I couldn’t see, couldn’t hear.
My eyes flew open. Sweat on my skin. I stared at the ceiling without seeing anything.
A dream. It was only a dream.
Soft scratching from the darkness. The cat? But . . .
I reached my hand towards the still figure beside me. I longed for the reassuring warmth of his sleeping body. His security.
But when my fingers stroked his skin, they felt not the rough hairs of a man’s arm but something plush, soft. And immediately afterwards . . . sticky, wet, as if . . .
‘Shh,’ Matt whispered in my hair. And I forced myself to relax.
You’re imagining things.
Only there was something sticking to my fingers when I woke up the following morning. Something I was certain I had washed away hours earlier in the hot water of the bath.
It couldn’t be blood.
It just couldn’t.
I was standing in front of the mirror when Matt gave me a quick good morning kiss. ‘Be a little kind to yourself,’ he whispered in my ear. ‘Don’t make yourself crazy, promise me that?’
I nodded obediently while I washed my hands and watched as a thin stream of red was caught in the water and sucked down the drain.
‘For real, ok?’ he insisted. He pulled on his jacket in the hallway. I saw how he patted his pocket to check if he had his cell phone with him.
‘For real,’ I promised again.
The door shut behind him with a bang that sounded more definitive than usual and a shiver went down my spine.
Only then did I let go of my right wrist, which I had been holding in my left hand, and look at the deep scratch the cat had made. It was fiery red and the edges were open a little. In between yellowish-white pus glistened. I wiped it away carefully with a tissue, but immediately thereafter more blood and pus welled up. At around a centimeter distance from the wound, all around, I saw that small, shiny blisters were forming.
I frowned. Matt had bent over the spot the night before. He had disinfected it, but I was better off letting it air-dry, he had said. Now it looked as though it were infected.
I put some new gauze on it – clumsily, with only my left hand – and got dressed. No matter what I’d promised Matt, I had no intention of sitting around the house all day. Not after that night.
The scratch on my wrist throbbed. Slower than my heartbeat and deep inside. I shut my eyes, shook off the unease, because that second promise – that I wouldn’t let myself go crazy – that one I intended to keep.
And so I ate a container of yogurt with granola and drank cappuccino from the far too expensive coffee machine Matt had given me last year for my birthday.
My car still smelled of a strange mixture of wet fur, blood, and panic from the night before. I saw the wet place where the animal had lain; the blood had leaked through the cardboard box. Under the trees too, just before the turnoff onto Appelstraat, I saw the evidence of the previous night’s events: black tracks that my car tires had left on the cobblestones.
I braked and drove slowly on towards number 79. Stepped out. Lead in my shoes. Repeated the greeting I had thought up: ‘Hello ma’am! I just wanted to see if you were doing all right. And if you still needed help with Dante.’ Saw the movement of the crocheted curtains behind the window next to the front door. The hint of dark fur between the folds. A cat that popped up behind the grimy glass.
My heart skipped a beat.
It couldn’t be him. Not that cat, not those too-short ears, that kink in the tail and that bloody crust over his eye where the cobblestones had scraped away his skin and fur. Even if he had in some miraculous way or other survived the accident, he couldn’t just be there . . . sitting.
And yet he was.
The animal came a little closer to the windowpane until the black hairs on its flanks splayed out against the glass like little spiders. He turned his head in my direction and looked at me. I looked back and I shouted at him wordlessly: What?!