Cat Tales

by Alma Alexander

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  Chapter 3:

  Safe House

  I've said it many times to those who have come to seek me out over the years. Happiness is a cocoon. You cannot find the safe house until you need it – because until you need it, you do not know that it is there.

  I don't know what changed for me when I turned ten. My family, until then my refuge and my sanctuary, turned a dark corner somehow – the details I still do not know, and I would have known even less of them back then, back when I was still a child, back when such things would not have been spoken of in front of me anyway. But that summer was when I remember things beginning to go rotten – I remember my life acquiring a queasy softness to it, the kind that would suck in a careful exploratory touch, let it sink into yielding spongy flesh as though into a fleshy paunch.

  The summer I turned ten was the summer my older brother was arrested – a bunch of his friends had held up a local convenience store, and although he was not the one actually holding the gun, he was the only one who was identified by the store owner (where our family shopped fairly regularly) and he was the only one picked up. He would not snitch on his mates, so he took the fall – and they managed to pin the charge of armed robbery and attempted murder on him. He was seventeen years old, but his eighteenth birthday loomed in mere weeks; the lawyers stretched out the trial, and on the day he turned eighteen they charged him in court as an adult. His life was shattered, gone, annihilated. It was as though he had grown up all these years, had waited all this time, only to hit this wall when he became old enough for the impact to kill him. I never saw him again.

  My mother went cold and distant after; she had held down a job as a receptionist at the local walk-in clinic for some time, but after the arrest she simply stopped being the same smiling, efficient, helpful person that the office wanted as their face to the world. By early fall the job had evaporated. She returned home one day, and never really left it again – and the weird and somehow scary thing was that she still got "dressed for work" every morning, with her smart work clothes getting more and more wrinkled and grungy and dirty, and then did very little else except sit and stare into space or occasionally into the TV where the endless cycles of the daytime soaps to which she would quickly become addicted followed one another in quick and dreary succession. It was a gradual thing, but it did not take too long for those twisted fantasies to become far more real to her than her own family's lives. She barely spoke to us at all, and it fell to me, often, to scrape together a meal for the family in the evenings when my scowling father came home from his own job. He had never been, had never aspired to be, anything more than what he was – a good mechanic who knew his way around cars. Had the fates been kinder he might have made a go of it in his own shop – but he had never had that chance. He had spent his life obeying other people's orders, often people far less qualified and way less savvy than he was, and he had managed to shoulder it all for a long time – but when the family fell apart, so did he, and the bitterness and resentment he had tried to keep from us now came home with him from work and became the silent guests at every meal.

  I learned quickly to keep my head down and my voice low. My younger brother, barely eight that summer, was still too much of a child to realize the need for it, the only one of us in the household who could still find a smile in a day. He took me out into the overgrown back yard that summer, and shared with me clouds shaped like dragons or like sailing ships or like pirate hats; he went wandering barefoot out into the streets and still managed to find, somewhere, in the weed-infested gutter-backyards of local businesses, something pretty – a posy of weed-flowers to bring back to our mother, who barely noticed them, or to me.

  He laughed out loud once too often, at the wrong time. My father lashed out in fury. My baby brother had to go to the Emergency Room to have stitches put into the gash in his scalp, ripped open when he flew across the kitchen and into the edge of the kitchen table, and to fix his broken nose. He did not laugh too much or too often, after that.

  I was thirteen when my father came home one night later than usual. I had left the porch light on, and my brother and I had retired to our rooms already – my mother was alone in the living room, alone in the dark with only the flickering light of the TV set for company. I could hear my father stumble into the entrance hall, and the glass shiver in the hallway window as he slammed the door hard; the creaky floorboards in the hall told me that he had not swung into the kitchen, where I had left a meal laid out for him, but had continued down the corridor which led to the back of the house and our bedrooms. The steps paused outside my own door.

  What instinct made me do it I don't know – but I was out of bed and underneath it in one swift move. I could barely see from where I was cowering, my view partially obstructed by disarranged bedclothes hanging down almost to the floor – but there was a thin and then widening ribbon of light as the door was pushed open and my father stood in the doorway looking inside. At my bed. At the bed where I should have been sleeping.

  He muttered something under his breath – not a worried exclamation at finding his daughter's bed empty, but something else, something that sounded angry and frustrated and actually peeved that something that he had wanted was not where he had though he had left it. Whether my senses were augmented by my fear, I don't know – but even underneath the bed I thought I could smell the reek of cheap beer that came from him – from this man in the doorway – standing between me and safety instead of being my bulwark against danger – knowing that I would never be safe in this house again.

  He left, and I stayed for a long time curled up on the dusty floor underneath my bed, shivering. And then I climbed out of my bedroom window, let myself down gently into the dirt of a fallow flower bed, and walked away from the house across cool evening grass, barefoot and wearing nothing but a thin nightgown which was beginning to be tight across my chest and which barely reaching to my knees.

  You cannot find a safe house until you need it – because until you need it you do not know it is there.

  The house at the far end of our street must have been there for as long as we had lived there. Must have been – it could not have popped up like a mushroom in the night, waiting for me as my bare feet hit the cold pavement of the sidewalk. It was full dark now, but there was a light on above the door of the cottage, glimpsed through a half-open gate leading into a wild garden. It was surrounded by a tall hedge, which was nothing but green now – but somehow, although I could have sworn that I was ignorant of this place, I knew that the bushes were lilacs and would be covered with purple blooms in the spring. In the meantime there were other scents here now – something soft and sweet and enticing, night-blooming jasmine perhaps, something that made me stop before the gate and hesitate, looking into the garden. A grey tabby cat sat on the top step of the porch, flicking its long tail, looking straight back at me with a grave and serene pair of golden eyes.

  This is a safe house.

  The words came at me from nowhere, from the night. I reflexively turned to look, to see who had spoken, but behind me there was nobody and nothing… nothing but night, thickening, lowering, gathering up against me, like a monster growing huge at my back, its bright stars slitted eyes waiting for me to take a wrong turn, to stumble, to slip, to fall, before it would swallow me whole.

  I stepped into the garden. The weight of the darkness immediately lessened, became less threatening; the tabby was gone, but the front door behind it was ajar. I could not remember whether it had been thus before or not – either way, it was unusual, and I stood frozen, caught between a sudden irrational fear of the dark and the terror of the unknown which lay behind that half-open, oh-so-inviting, door bathed in the spill of a lantern-shaped light fixed just above it.

  "Come in," a voice called from inside. "You are welcome here."

  There were slippers waiting by the door, and they seemed to be there for me – I examined my cold but grimy feet with some misgivings, but then slipped on the
quilted slippers anyway and ventured a few steps further in. Through an archway to my left, a small cozy sitting room opened up, a tall lamp with a tasselled lampshade made from heavy yellow silk cast a warm golden glow on the place. There was a stone fireplace, with a wrought-iron fire-screen before it; a wingback armchair with a tapestry throw on it; a bay window with a calico-upholstered cushion on the window seat, where a majestic black cat was currently stretched out in an act of ownership and possession which left no doubt as to his absolute right to claim this particular spot in the room for his own. There were bookshelves on two of the three walls, stuffed with books; some looked old, ready to fall apart, and others barely read, as though they had been brought home from the bookstore an hour ago.

  "Tea?" said the voice that had invited me in.

  I turned sharply. A silver-haired woman stood smiling at me from the doorway across the room, leading out into the kitchen; she had a paisley shawl wrapped loosely around her shoulders, and was dressed in a long cotton shift which left her feet bare. She gestured with a hand, back in the direction of the kitchen. "I've just put the kettle on. You look like you need a cup of tea. I've cookies, too. Go make friends with Felix, I'll be right back."

  Felix, the black cat, yawned at the mention of his name, flicking his tail and glancing in my direction with haughty emerald eyes.

  "Where's the other cat?" I asked incongruously. "The tabby…?"

  "Oh, around," said the woman, and smiled. The smile was strange, an accent note, a hint of cinnamon in apple pie, suggesting that there was more beneath the surface of the question than met the eye – but that was all I got. She ducked back into the kitchen, and I dutifully padded over to crouch next to Felix, who suffered me to scratch under his chin, his eyes closing to slits, a hint of a purr escaping from his vibrating throat.

  The rattle of cup against saucer brought my attention back to the low table in the middle of the sitting room; as I turned, the silver-haired woman was just straightening after putting down a tray containing a tea cozy presumably hiding a teapot, two porcelain cups and saucers with pink roses on the sides, and a plate of cookies.

  I stared at the offerings.

  "I… no, thank you," I said awkwardly, suddenly overwhelmed by a sense of being in fairy country, that taking a sip of tea or a bit of cookie would cost me my freedom, or my soul. It would mean something I only barely understood, an acceptance of a contract the terms of which I did not know; it would be almost like allowing a door to close behind me without any guarantees that it would be opened again if I wished to leave.

  But there was something in the scent of those cookies. A smell of belonging, and safety, and home. It was the scent of my baby brother's laughter before it had been quenched.

  "What kind of cookies are they?" I asked, unable to help myself.

  "Chocolate chips, of course. Everything tastes better with chocolate," my hostess said. "And my own honey, for sweetening, instead of sugar."

  "You make honey?"

  "Well, the bees do. I have a hive, out back," she said.

  I could have sworn I had never noticed this house before, but once she said that I could remember things quite clearly – the garden in summer, just sufficiently unkempt to invite pleasurable speculation and daydreams about what went on behind that tangle of bushy lilacs, old-fashioned roses, holly, rowan, hazel a bunch of colorful flowers for which there were no real names – they were just splashes of scarlet or blue or gold amongst the green.

  There were butterflies. And humming birds. And a stork had a nest on the chimney pot, and swallows' nests in the eaves.

  And there were bees – a quiet heady hum to the flowers in the dog days of summer, something somnolent and sweet, lulling, inviting, as though to step through her gate – never quite closed, always a little ajar – would mean stepping into a small piece of heaven, apart from the rush and tumble of the real-life world.

  There were other memories. There were cats – always cats – lots of cats; there was the silver tabby which I remembered seeing outside the front door, the sleek black silhouette of Felix… but there had been others, a streak of marmalade, or a glimpse of tortoiseshell. Sometimes they seemed to be hurt, slinking into the garden, limping, looking like they had been in a fight, with scratched noses or shredded ears.

  "Where's all your other cats?" I dared to ask, my voice sounding thin and reedy with an odd sort of apprehension.

  "They come and go," she said. "Felix and I, we are the only ones that live here. The others come when they need me. This is a safe house."

  It was the second time I had heard those words.

  "Don't worry, sweet girl. You will always be safe here," she said.

  The world smelled of jasmine, and quiet night, and sanctuary. She held out the plate of cookies. I took one.

  I don't remember going home, but I woke in my own bed, late; my father had already left for work and my mother was at her accustomed spot in front of the TV, staring at it with dead eyes, wearing work nylons which were twisted around her ankles in an untidy spiral and which had a run all the way up one calf.

  The world was still wounded, still wrong, still hurt. But there was something new in it, something that I could not – yet – name or find a proper place for. The world was no less full of fear and of darkness… but there was something I sensed standing between me and the true horror of it all.

  I didn't find out exactly what until some two or three days later. My father had been late home again, but this time I was still out in the kitchen when he returned from work. His eyes were terrible – black holes in his face, empty of anything other than anger and need. He looked straight at me, and said my mother's name – very softly, but very clearly – and the hand that reached for me was not the hand of a father. It was the hand of a man, reaching for a body to slake a need. I was not his daughter in that moment. Perhaps I never would be again.

  Somehow I slipped from his grasping arms, whimpering, half-blinded with terror and with tears, and ran for the safety of my room – but it was an illusion, for we had doors that did not lock and even if they did his weight would tear the flimsy door from its hinges if he chose to lean on it hard enough. But I skittered into the darkness of my room, slammed the door closed behind me, stood with my back against it for a breathless moment, and then heard his heavy steps following me down the corridor. I left the door, backed into the far corner, coming up against the wall when there was no further room for retreat, slid down it until I sat curled in a pathetic ball of fear and helplessness, arms wrapped tightly around knees drawn up against my chin, eyes huge and dark and fixed on the doorway through which he would inevitably come…

  And what escaped from my mouth was a hiss, a cat's hiss, a feral noise of challenge and defiance.

  My sight had changed, shifted. The room was still there, still familiar, but everything was larger now, looming, and I was no longer a cowering kid, I was a small brindled cat tucked into the corner of the room, back arched, teeth bared, eyes burning with rebellion. I was armed now, tooth and claw. Whatever came, I could take it.

  But other things had changed, too. What did come was not my father, not the man I knew, anyway. What came into that room, seeking me with a hot and urgent need, was a demon of darkness with eyes as burning as my own, burning with a black fire of madness and evil.

  This was the true thing that I had risen against. Not the man who sired me, whose blood ran in my own veins. We had both changed, turned into something different, something deadlier, something greater than ourselves.

  I could have fled. As the cat, I was small enough, agile enough, and the window was open – one leap, and I might have been safe. But this was a shadow I knew for an enemy – and it was an enemy for others, not just for myself. Any victory here would be a victory for other innocent souls which it had devoured, souls which had lain defenseless in its path.

  Unlike me.

  I stood my ground. The shadow flowed into the room, over my empty bed, spasmed, shivered, growled,
turned; its claws were none the less deadly for that they were not totally of this world, because they were more than that, because their wounds would go deeper than flesh, would scar the soul. And yet – and yet – they had to be faced, because this was an old battle, and if they were not faced down they merely grew stronger.

  We came together, the shadow and the cat, in the middle of the room. The pain was unbearable, incandescent; I howled my agony, recoiling, twisting, fighting, biting, scratching. But I too made my mark because where my claws raked the thing shredded and faded, and light came through the cracks – and that helped. A little. By the time we broke apart, the shadow to retreat through the closed door, the small cat with scoured flanks and a deep claw-cut beading blood above one eye, out of the window… and running as fast as it could, limping on one wounded paw, towards the cottage at the end of the street.

  This is a safe house.

  At last, I understood.

  She was waiting for me, the silver-haired woman, compassion in her eyes. She had ointment ready, and clean cloth soaked in warm water to bathe my wounds – and I was a girl again, in this house, my human body bearing the scars of my battle that night, but fading slowly under her ministrations.

  "The first time," she murmured, dabbing at the cut above my eye. "The first time is always the very worst. You have no idea what to expect. And then it exceeds every expectation you could not possibly have had. It hurts. Ah, it hurts. I know. I bear my own scars."

  "The other cats," I said slowly.

  She nodded. "Like you, in a way," she said. "They come here already wounded, creatures seeking sanctuary. And I help, I am here for all of them. They are all called here before the worst happens, so that I can meet them, know them, give them the cookies… with the secret ingredient in it, the one that makes it possible for them to escape if they need to, to run like a cat can, clear-eyed in the dark, and find their way back here to be healed. But you are not one of those. You are different. You fought the darkness."