Felidae on the Road - Special U.S. Edition

by Akif Pirincci

  The unimaginable brutality of it literally took my breath away. Ugh! It was a horrible picture, much worse than all the visions of amputation I'd seen in my imagination when Francesca started in on her nuts project. As the headless body circled and floated past me, disappearing into the darkness again, I wondered who could have done such a thing to a defenceless creature - and most of all, why. Although the victim had lost his head, which made it harder for me to identify the breed, the body, even deformed as it was, told my expert eye that this had been an ordinary European Shorthair. The members of this breed weren't exactly famous for wholesale aggression, and they certainly didn't go gunning for jokers whose fangs were drooling with murderous lust. But was the monstrous murderer necessarily an animal? Homo sapiens was more given to such bloodthirsty goings-on, to the infliction of pointless violence just for the fun to be got out of suffering. There was one good argument against this theory, however: humans like to use instruments of various kinds when practising torture. Those instruments are symbols of their power - are even glorified in their culture as fetishes. As far as I could tell, however, the injuries inflicted in this case had not been made by knives, scalpels or sharp, pointed objects. No, they were the work of elemental, unadulterated violence arising from a natural and insatiable lust for blood. I hated to admit it to myself, but the whole thing looked horribly like one of those inexplicable fits of brutality in which my own kind sometimes indulge.

  The horrific object was drifting away again. In my imagination it turned into a floating coffin decked with flowers, the sort of funeral people still give the dead today in some exotic cultures. Finally the darkness swallowed it up. I looked the way it had gone for some time longer, as if hypnotised, full of deep and genuine grief. As I stood there I imagined how this fellow member of my species might have looked in life. His fur, white as blossom, must surely have shone in the midday sun like dazzling snow; his sapphire eyes would have seemed to bore right through a chance observer if their glances met. And when he slept by a glowing fire on a frosty winter evening, stretching and flexing his muscles as if in a trance, he must have been over a metre long. He had certainly been a rare jewel of his species, in fact the cat's whiskers, and a source of fascination to one and all. So it was particularly shattering to think of his meeting such a dreadful, undignified end. 'Goodbye, white stranger,' I said at last, out loud. 'We shall meet in heaven.'

  Good grief, what did I think I was up to? Hadn't I anything better to do than mourn an unknown corpse and deliver melancholy funeral orations? How did I know the gourmet who had learnt to know and love the deceased as cocktail nibbles wasn't lying in wait right now, somewhere near at hand, following the course of my investigations with a grin and indulging in culinary fantasies as his belly rumbled? I was in a kind of anteroom to hell, after all, a place into which those above off-loaded all their nastier and less attractive products, consigning them to the process of decay. There were no Gustavs here to step in at the last moment if some deranged cannibal went for my windpipe, no offices with nostalgic old telephones where the Philip Marlowe of the pointy-eared race could retreat when his detective work was done. There was nothing here but gloom, damp and dirt - and eerily bloated corpses. And who knew, perhaps there really were dear little goblins living in the sewers who usually ate shit and drank industrial waste, but might fancy a change from their usual diet if a small creature on his travels fetched up in their domain? I imagined them as slavering horror versions of some supermarket chain's consumer research project ...

  As if my negative thinking had actually conjured up the evil thing itself, I suddenly heard a stealthy rustling. It resonated through the tunnel and then mingled with the echoes of the drops and those other eerie noises which probably came from the imperceptible 'breathing' of such a huge stone maze. Before I could erect my fur into bristles with alarm and arch my back in defence, I heard another rustling sound, rather closer this time. I tried and failed to decide which direction it was coming from. In rapid succession, like a motor-driven camera rattling away, my eyes fixed on all the unlit corners from which a monster might spring at any moment, on all the dancing shadows on the walls. Discouraged, I realised there was nothing to be seen. Yet I instinctively felt that these transient noises couldn't be put down either to my overheated imagination or to any chance activity that happened to produce sound. At a moment of suspense like this in a thriller movie you generally see the hero's black colleague emerge from the darkness, whereupon the hero breathes a sigh of relief because that explains the creaking door which made his flesh creep. I wasn't sure if I'd have found a variant on that theme particularly reassuring just now. Calling on my common sense, therefore, I decided to put my previous plan into action: I'd go on along the walkway until I found some way out of the sewers, and never mind how often the ghosts rattled their chains to scare me.

  With studied indifference, as if I'd seen enough of some breathtaking natural scene, I turned away from the waters of the sewer and marched straight into the dark. It was like plunging into some amorphous living mass with the terrible certainty of never getting out again. Now and then I took a surreptitious backward glance, looking about as inconspicuous as a shoplifter hiding a fridge under his T-shirt. As I did so I thought I saw shadows of an even more dubious nature flitting around the bottom of the sewer shaft, which was filled with blue light and growing smaller and smaller behind me. Was the paranoia that had surely been caused by the claustrophobic conditions of these catacombs already turning to outright hallucinations? I'd happily have invested total conviction in this theory, putting my persecution mania and the way my teeth chattered with fear down to the shock of finding the corpse, if only ... if only I hadn't heard that nerve-racking rustling again. But it wasn't a rustling this time. It was a shuffling and a secret scuffling, a growling and a scratching. And suddenly it wasn't just coming from behind me but from everywhere, every nook and cranny. As I quickened my pace and finally broke into a frantic gallop, I risked another glance behind me. This time I couldn't pretend I was suffering from optical illusions and nervous tension induced by fear. For now I saw distinct moving silhouettes outlined before the lighter background. What made my heart hammer to the rhythm of a heavy metal beat was the fact that they, whoever they might be, were emerging from their hidey-holes in such numbers, as if a signal had been given. All of a sudden there was a gigantic army of shadows close on my heels. And though I couldn't see anything ahead of me in the dark I could feel, with physical certainty, that an equally large troop was approaching from that direction. Good God, where had these bastards sprung from all of a sudden, and what were they?

  Rats! Of course, a sewer without rats would be like a cemetery without well-fed worms, the kind of worms who on reaching pensionable age have the nerve to demand high premiums from their successors for their own particular sections of a grave. With the delightful little difference that rats of this sort obviously ate my kind. For safety's sake I kept up my high speed, hoping the way out of this horrible nightmare which I longed for might appear before me any moment, like an oasis appearing to someone dying of thirst in the desert. But the mob on my heels seemed to be highly motivated too and was rapidly closing in. A last glance back made me shudder. Like a severely overweight black snake, an apparently endless legion of indefinable creatures was moving along behind me, and the word 'legion' really hit the nail on the head, since this pack was obviously running in orderly ranks; there would be no headlong rush with individual members of the pack getting in each other's way. It was an army marching on soft paws, a purposeful army, driving me into a corner and already sure of victory. No doubt its strategy of quiet attack had proved successful more than once before. The light behind these soldiers shone on their backs and showed the outlines of hairs, from which I concluded that like me they had fur. Unusually for mammals of my category, however, their eyes did not shine in the dark. In my kind, that effect is caused by the reflective layer in our eyes, a mirror-like structure extending behind most of the
retina. It is present in most other nocturnal animals as well, and reflects light which is not absorbed by the retina when it first enters the eye. This gives the retina an additional luminous stimulus, increasing the sensitivity of vision in poor light. Of course there was very little brightness here anyway, so the eye-shine effect wouldn't necessarily have been on view, but I'd have bet my own peepers were shining like the Stop signals at a level crossing right now. There seemed to be something in my theory of a bestially mutated consumer group after all.

  Then the miracle happened! About twenty metres ahead I actually saw a ray of light emerging from the bottom of the wall on my right and shining diagonally down into the sewer like a dazzling lance. It probably came from the inlet of a drainpipe slanting down from the street to carry off rainwater. Since day must have dawned some time ago, light could now come into the sewers through the drainpipe. With a bit of luck I might be able to wriggle up it to the world above and escape my pursuers. In sudden euphoria I switched to turbo drive, like an athlete putting on a final spurt at the end of the thousand metres, and raced on as fast as my tired joints would go. The lance of light, which was getting brighter every moment and seemed to cut the gloomy sewer in two, was approaching at amazing speed, and I was delighted to find that the sound of the mob after me soon died away. Another ten metres, another five metres, another two metres; that shining hole in the wall looked more and more like a magic gate beyond which outright madness would drop away, and such unjustly criticised phenomena as addiction to TV, the weekend glooms, Monday-morning feelings, in fact the normality of ordinary life would begin again. At last I reached the longed-for passage to freedom and prepared for a sharp right turn. The monsters could seethe in bitter frustration or eat each other up for all I cared ...

  The colossus emerged from the bright hole in the wall as suddenly as a super-tanker from a bank of fog just before a collision. As I tried to slam the emergency brakes on I thought I'd run straight into some goddam dog - a dog which had gone to the bad and turned into a monster, though. About a metre before this imposing figure I stumbled, lost my balance, fell over, turned a full somersault and finally landed in front of its shaggy paws. Expecting it to be already bending down to smash my head in, I opened my eyes a crack, out of sheer masochism, and looked straight at its face. It looked even freakier and more dangerous from ground level than stomach level, a phrase to be taken literally, because even on my feet I only came up to its belly. Despite its monstrous size I immediately saw that it wasn't a dog at all, but one of my own species, a Chartreux.(5) This fellow had his breed's typical and enviably dense short, smoky blue coat, although it was so full of sewage sludge that the soft and downy texture of the fur was largely lost. His type also showed in the healthily compact build often regarded by the ignorant as obesity, although in this particular specimen the muscle and extra fat tissue had combined so happily that it was hard to be sure if you were facing a tub of lard or a muscle man boasting resilience and elasticity. In any case he was incredibly large, in fact massive, and above all he was absolutely terrifying. He did, however, differ from the usual variety of neighbourhood tyrant in three respects, and they froze the blood in my veins. The first difference seemed pretty harmless compared to the other two: this giant stank so much you'd have thought he went diving for treasure in the sewers every day of his life. I didn't know whether to throw up straight away or wait until he'd exercised his own operating technique on my oesophagus. The second difference was more alarming. He had no eyes. I mean, he had eyeballs all right, but they were covered with a milky film, like a lighter version of cataract. Set in his blue-grey face, these milky orbs had a particularly grotesque effect, giving their owner the scary look of a sinister medieval dabbler in the black arts. My intending murderer was blind as a bat. Unlike human beings, however, he didn't necessarily need eyes to get his bearings - and certainly not to kill! Third and last, there were his earrings; golden earrings, strangely clean for all his dirt and shining in the eerie light. His earlobes were very ragged; the earrings probably got caught in various objects from time to time and had made more space for themselves.

  The executioner of my fate stood there in the flood of light, a mighty, indeed almighty figure, and as improbable a sight as a Christmas goose found horrifically resurrected when you open the fridge door. He stared intently down at me with his white eyes, as if wondering which of my organs would taste best. His pale coat, patterned with encrusted dirt and bare patches left by rat-bites, gave his huge body the look of a threadbare Bruin costume as worn by 'resting' actors performing at children's birthday parties. After a while he raised his head with extraordinary grace and looked around him. I imitated him, following the direction of his blind gaze. What I then saw made my bladder want to empty itself again with the shock, but unfortunately it was empty already. The army which had been chasing me had caught up and formed a dense crowd around me. Each member of the audience seemed to be a faithful copy of the big boss. Only a few of them were of the Chartreux breed, of course, so far as you could tell one breed from another at all in this dim light, and none of them wore gold earrings, so I concluded that my opponent must be someone quite out of the ordinary. But they all stank to high heaven, they all had scarred coats matted with sewage sludge, and all of them, absolutely all of them, were blind, staring at me with those milky, useless eyes.

  There was a disturbance of some kind behind the front row of the circle. Apparently the dinner gong had sounded and the troops at the back wanted to get their noses in the trough. The awesome old character with the matted whiskers bent down to me, a sardonic smile crossing his broad and dirty face.

  'Your hour has come, little one!' he said in a deep bass voice reminiscent of the growling of villainous actors in movies about the drugs Mafia.

  Instead of trying a retort - such as: 'Listen, I can tell you where to buy really fabulous tinned food' - I asked myself for the nth time why I'd ever been fool enough to run away. By now I could have come round from the anaesthetic, admired my new streamlined anatomy in the mirror, eaten a hearty meal and entered upon a new life free of all the fuss and bother of sex. I could have survived, dammit! And above all I could have followed the advice of the ever-reliable Schopenhauer, who unerringly spotted the dangers of making vital decisions without sufficient thought, over a century ago, and warned idiots like me that: 'We may not have to atone for evil-doing until the next world, but we pay for stupidity in this one ...'

  CHAPTER 3

  '... although justice may occasionally be tempered with mercy.' I finish the quotation just to make things tidy, but expecting mercy from a horde of cannibals was rather like requesting estate agents to turn over three-quarters of their profits to a charitable housing project. These blind restaurant critics - probably from the Good Carrion Guide - were staring at me in a manner which suggested it would be a merciful act if they tore my head off first and started tucking into Fillet Steaks Francis later.

  A gazelle-like creature came into view behind Big Daddy Golden Earring. Obviously she couldn't wait for the gruesome buffet to open. Swift as an arrow, however, the boss's great club of a paw shot up. It struck the eager lady's chest with a hollow thud, stopping her in her tracks. She was a sinewy young thing, still growing, and her matt coat was even blacker than this black inferno itself could ever be. Her ears, once so sensitive, had lost their original funnel shape and were now ragged and shredded, either by countless battles with other warriors or the furious resistance put up by rats at bay. A scarf which had been lying in a drawer for years providing a home for moths couldn't have looked worse. There was an ugly scar across her face, perhaps a memento left by some startled sewage worker's sharp metal tool. Her muscular figure resembled that of a pure-bred greyhound; she must be an Oriental. She might have a punk look, but her eyes, icily iridescent as neon, and the claws protruding like murderous sickles from her paw pads, told me I'd come out of a duel with this wiry lady as mincemeat. This, in short, was a young witch who liked to cook herself
up some blood broth on occasion.

  'Come on, little one, aren't you going to make a break for it?' asked the Prince of Darkness with mock concern. Misty vapour seemed to swirl in his eyes.

  Well, guess what! He had a sense of humour. Not being the melancholy sort myself, I replied, 'Certainly not, old chap! It's quite a treat to meet comrades in a lonely spot like this. Inspires one with confidence.'