Cat's Eyes

by Alan Scholefield

  Then the headlights of Celia’s car swept around the drive and fear, even stronger than hunger, sent it back to its shelter. Much later, when the snow turned to rain, it emerged again.

  16

  Rachel wished Celia had not mentioned the cat. Its behaviour was the one thing about which Alec’s rational explanations were still not entirely convincing. If Celia was right and it had been the same cat she had injured, the theory that she had seen several different creatures did not stand up. And it would be difficult to mistake the cat because of its unnatural size.

  She remembered, and it gave her comfort, that the shotgun in the cellar was still set ready to fire. She had told Alec to leave it, as nobody went near the area outside the meshwindow. When Bill came home he could dismantle it and find some other way to get rid of the cat.

  She shook off her misgivings and decided to pour herself a drink. As she crossed the sitting-room with her glass she caught sight of herself in the mirror above the fireplace and thought, with surprise: You’re a different person! The shadow behind her eyes had gone, her face was flushed and animated, her mouth curved up in a smile. She raised her glass to the reflection and said aloud: “And this is the last time you and I will be drinking alone. Thank God!”

  She sat in front of the fire, sipping her drink and planning. Bill would telephone from the airport. He would probably take the train to Chichester and she could pick him up there. Then they would go to Addiscombe and collect Sophie.

  There was a tapping on the window. She sat as though turned to stone. Silence collected in the room. Had it been her imagination? It came again. Tap ... tap ... tap ... the way it always started in the dream. She found herself locked into a state of shock, listening not only with her ears, but with every part of her body. Tap ... tap ... tap. It was insistent, like the ringing of a telephone, demanding to be answered, demanding to be investigated.

  Almost in a trance, she found herself moving towards the closed curtains as though drawn on a length of string. Her hands went up and she jerked them aside. She had known all along what she would see. There was the face, hair plastered down by the rain, the blood trickling from the forehead. The eyes ... the eyes ... the scream burst from her throat and shattered the silence, and came again and again as she stood with her hands to her cheeks, staring at this monstrous thing in the night.

  Then, as the first shock wore off, she saw there was something wrong with the face. The eyes were not sunk into the skull as human eyes are and the head was devoid of ears. She leant forward, stared through the rain-driven glass and found herself looking at a tailor’s dummy on which a face had been crudely drawn under a dark wig. It was a trick. A game. She whirled around, but there was no one in the room behind her.

  Tap ... tap ... tap.

  It couldn’t be. How could a dummy ... ? She turned again and this time there were two faces at the window, the second a frightening, patchwork thing, distorted even more by the rain on the windows. It was Alec.

  Oh, God, she whispered. She pulled the curtains closed with a snap. Hysteria and panic had her by the throat. She backed away from the windows towards the study, towards the telephone from which she could call the police.

  Alec! The name repeated itself over and over. It had been Alec all the time!

  She was half-way across the floor when she heard a man’s voice. It spoke slowly and clearly: “First the tapping. It came above the rain and the wind. Just a tapping. At the window.”

  She screamed again, for the voice was as familiar to her as her own. It was Bill’s voice. She ran towards the hall and at that moment all the lights in the house went off. She fled blindly from the sitting-room, panic pumping the adrenalin into her muscles. She found herself in the hall. The front door was locked — but the key had gone. She ran to the kitchen and the back passage where Franco had had his basket. That door, too, was locked and the key was gone. She stood in the passage, her heart hammering in her ears, casting about her like a fox brought to bay. All the windows on the ground floor had burglarproof locks. She needed a key to open them. She could not think where it was.

  She stood in the darkness trying to clear her mind, trying to form some sort of plan. It was her house. She knew it well. That was all she had in her favour. The telephone. She dared not go back to the one downstairs. But there was an extension in her bedroom. She listened, but the house was silent.

  She went to the back staircase, stopped, listened again, then slowly began to go up. Suddenly there was a tremendous crash of glass from somewhere near the kitchen. A scream rose into her throat again but she managed to choke it down. Ignoring the sudden pain in her knee she ran into her bedroom and picked up the telephone. It came away in her hand. The wire had been cut.

  Think, she told herself desperately. Think!

  None of the upstairs windows were burglarproofed and the one in the spare room opened onto the roof of the front porch. She might be able to clamber onto it and climb down to the ground. She crossed the hall, let herself into the spare room and closed the door. She tried to lock it but this key, too, had been removed.

  The window opened easily. The porch roof seemed ominously far below. If she could get her body over the sill and hang by her hands she might just be able to reach it with her toes and once there ...

  It was no more than a whisper, but she heard it clearly. Bill said: “Jump! Why don’t you jump!” His voice was warm and friendly and had an almost hypnotic quality. The shock caused her to teeter on the window sill. She drew back and swung around. A figure was standing in the doorway. “Do you want to spend your life with mad people?” Bill said. “This is your chance. Take it now. Jump.”

  A torch beam flickered over the walls of the landing and picked out the figure in the doorway. For a second it was brightly -lit and Rachel saw it was Celia. She was dressed in jeans and a parka. In her left hand she held Bill’s dictating machine, and in her right a meat knife, one of Rachel’s own Sabatiers from the kitchen, with a blade six inches long.

  Another voice said, “You bloody bitch!” It was Alec, and he, too, was coming up the stairs towards her, holding a torch.

  Then he tripped. She heard him stumble and the torch gyrated wildly for a moment before it went out. She heard it roll down the stairs. In that second, when Celia’s attention had been diverted, she grabbed up a pillow from the bed, flung it at Celia’s head, and raced past her. At the top of the stairs she ran into another body, and screamed. It was Alec, getting to his feet. She went down the stairs, hearing above her the sound of shouting and violent movement. Her foot touched something. It was the torch, and she scooped it up.

  She had no idea what was happening, only that she must find safety. She could hear them on the stairs behind her. She remembered the cellar. That was the one door in the house that had no lock. It had a bolt on the house-side, but also a bolt on the cellar-side, from the days before the back section of the house had been added and when the door had opened into the garden. She flung it open, felt for the steep, plunging steps, then closed the door behind her, throwing the rusty bolt into its socket. She slithered down into the cellar, now bathed in silvery light. She heard the handle of the door turn. Then a body banged into it. But the bolt had held for thirty years and held now. She heard the bolt on the other side being slid into its socket. While there was no way into the cellar, there was also no way out. A heavy black cloud crossed the moon and the cellar was plunged into darkness so thick that she could see nothing. She was about to switch on the torch, but stopped herself. They might see the beam through a crack in the door and they did not know she had the torch; it could give her an advantage. The freezer was over to her right, the boiler to her left. Ahead she could make out the overgrown screen and the bars at the window as a lighter shade of dark. She knew that underneath the window was the coal-chute and she knew the cat food was still there, for while she could not see it, she could smell it.

  She began to feel her way across the cellar towards the freezer. After what seemed
like minutes, but could only have been seconds, she touched it. She crouched in the angle between the freezer and the wall, where the cat had hidden the night she had surprised it.

  The cloud passed the moon and the components of the cellar became visible, though not as clearly as before. She looked at the window. A figure was bending down towards it, cutting the moonlight.

  “Now where will you run?” Celia said.

  She kept quite still, knowing that in her hiding-place she could not be seen.

  “Come out, come out, wherever you are,” Celia said, imitating a child’s voice. And then she laughed. “Poor Rachel! Did you like my game of hide and seek? I haven’t played it since I was a child. I must say, I thought the recorder was a stroke of genius, didn’t you? I could use Bill’s voice whenever I liked. Did you get a hint on the telephone? All those calls. They were fun, too. I wanted you to get just a hint that the voice was Bill’s. The merest feeling. I didn’t want to spoil the grand finale. I’ve planned it for so long.”

  So she had taken the tapes, Rachel thought.

  As if reading her mind Celia said: “I found them weeks ago. I’ve been all over your house, you know. During those walks you took, when Penny was playing with the child. She didn’t have a clue. And I’ve watched you almost every day, and you never knew. I even saw you looking for the tapes in Bill’s room. But I had them by then. I’d edited them by then. Just the bits I wanted. It’s fascinating, you know ...” The words trailed off.

  Why? Rachel asked herself. Why?

  The voice started again. “I used to play games with my mother. Hide and seek, in a house much bigger than this. I would hide and she would seek. And once she hid.” The voice was dreamy, with a far-off quality, as though Celia was talking to herself, reminding herself of the past. “I was frightened of that house. Frightened of her. Just as you are frightened of me. Once I hid in a cupboard and she locked the door and pretended to go away. I could hear her starting the car outside. But it was only a tease, you see, because I had been untidy. Now you are the one who is hiding, and I am seeking — and finding.”

  Rachel was stung into speech: “What do you want?”

  “Ah, so you were there. I thought you must be. The young Mrs. Chater. Wife of the well-known novelist. Such a handsome couple. Now look at you!” She laughed.

  “What do you want?”

  “You,” Celia said.

  “Me? But why me? What have I ever done to you?”

  “Don’t you remember your Bible? ‘Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe ...’ You see, I know it all.”

  She rattled the window bars as though trying to break them. “You had your chance upstairs,” she said. “Why didn’t you take it?” She beat at the bars with a dead branch but made no impression. Frustrated, her voice was harsh when she spoke again. “You thought you had it all, didn’t you? You stupid American bitch. The whole bloody lot. My husband ... my baby ... the lot!”

  Rachel was confused. “What husband? What baby? You’re mad!”

  “That’s what they tried to say, but it isn’t true. They killed my baby! ‘Eye for eye’ ... don’t you see?”

  “It was you! You tried to kill Sophie!”

  There was a pause. “That went wrong, didn’t it?” Celia said in a softer voice. “You came down too soon. And I even thought of the scratches on the cot. Clever Celia. My mother always knew I was clever. She never said so, but she knew.”

  “You’re insane!” She had said the same thing to Nurse Griffin. This time she knew she was right.

  Celia laughed. “We’ll see. We’ll see. Now don’t go away, will you?”

  Rachel heard her footsteps fade away; but then they seemed to merge with another sound.

  Tap ... tap ... tap.

  She pressed back against the wall, trying to make herself as small as possible.

  Tap ... tap ...

  She covered her ears with her hands, but it was no use. Although the tapping was faint, it penetrated her hearing.

  “Rachel!” The voice was hollow, as though coming from the bottom of a well; little more than a whisper, filled with a strange, ghostly resonance. There was something desperate and despairing about it. “For God’s sake, help me!” It was coming from the cellar door. She looked up at the window, but Celia had not returned. Softly she crossed the cellar and climbed the stairs. As she reached the top the voice said again, “Rachel!”

  It was Alec. She knelt on the steps and placed her ear against the door panels. She could hear him breathing, a ragged stertorous sound.

  “Alec?” she whispered.

  He groaned. Then her hand touched something sticky. She jerked away and switched on the torch. A dark pool of blood had formed on the top step and was dripping onto the next. It was seeping under the cellar door.

  “Help me!” Alec said.

  For a few moments she did not move. What if Celia was out there? She thought, what if the blood was not blood, but was part of the game, too? Then she remembered the knife in Celia’s hand and Alec’s voice shouting, “You bloody bitch!” She had assumed he was shouting at her but it must have been at Celia. And then ... what? Had Celia used the knife on Alec? If so, then Alec was on her side. She slipped the bolt and heard the one on the other side click back. She switched on the torch and opened the door.

  Alec was on his knees, facing her, his hands clutching the right side of his neck. Blood was spilling over in a rivulet, running down his arms and chest and forming a pool on the floor.

  “Oh, Jesus!” Rachel whispered.

  As she helped him to his feet she realised he was holding the edges of his wound closed. He swayed as, slowly, she brought him down the steps and closed the door behind him, making sure the bolt went home. He sank onto the cellar floor.

  Panting with the effort, she ripped a seam of her light woollen skirt and wound a strip of it around his neck like a scarf, trying to keep the lips of the wound closed.

  “Can we — get out?” he gasped. “Where’s Celia?”

  “I don’t know. She was at the window, then she went away.”

  “She’ll be back.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “Because I know her now. We’ve got to get away!”

  “Can you walk?”

  “Help me up.”

  She helped him to his knees, then slipped her arms under his so she could heave him to his feet. He draped an arm around her shoulders and she could hear his breathing, like strangled sobs, in her ear. He was not a tall man, but he was thick-set and heavy and she seemed to be bearing almost his full weight.

  She put her foot on the first step, terrified she might hear Celia at the door and Alec, supporting himself on one side against the wall, moved with her. They had reached the third step when the uneven distribution of weight on her injured leg caused her knee to twist suddenly as she tried to keep her balance. Pain shot through her body and it was as though the leg became jelly. It buckled under her and she and Alec fell back and landed in a tangled heap on the floor. When she regained her breath the pain in her knee was like fire but, as far as she could tell, she was otherwise unhurt.

  “Are you all right?” she whispered desperately.

  She felt him move, heard him whisper, “Yes.” She tried to stand but, again, the leg would not support her. There was no question of her mounting the stairs, with or without Alec.

  She was shivering. “Alec, what’s happening?”

  He did not reply and for a moment she thought he had lapsed into unconsciousness. She flicked the torch on and off. His eyes were open and he was staring past her at nothing. “Alec ...”

  “I told myself it was your imagination,” he said. “I told myself that it was a reaction to the accident. I told myself all sorts of things ...”

  “It was Celia? All the time?”

  His head was against her arm, and she felt him nod. The strange, whispering voice went on: “ ... by yourself. Knew
you were by yourself so I ... so I came down and then ... then I saw the thing at the window ...”

  “The dummy.”

  “It was hers. I knew, you see ... In her bedroom ... For dressmaking.”

  Rachel had a vision of Alec and Celia in bed, the dummy standing in the corner of the room, watching them.

  He said, so softly she could hardly hear: “My fault ... I wouldn’t believe it ... could have stopped ...”

  “Alec, when did you know?”

  “The dead cat ...”

  “In the road? What ... ?”

  “Whatever you said, I knew it hadn’t been there before. Only Celia ... I took the body home ... Not run over ... strangled. Dead for days ... recognised it then. It was one of hers.”

  “Hers? I didn’t know she had a cat.”

  “Loved ... cats. She had two ... Then only one. Said the other had ... run away ... But I wouldn’t believe ...” His voice faded away.

  “Alec? Alec?”

  “Came ... to see you ... locked ... had to break a window ... heard Bill’s voice ... followed her ... Knife ...”

  “Alec!”

  But he did not answer.

  *

  The cat had pulled itself along the side of the house towards the window which represented safety and food, the only two instincts remaining in its flickering brain. The hole in the mesh was more than a foot off the ground and it could not pull itself up. It tried twice and then its strength gave out and it lay in the darkness at the base of the window. There were footsteps on the gravel. Tiny electrical impulses in what was left of its brain warned it to get away and it began to gather itself for the effort.

  *