So Ulthar went to sleep in vain anger; and when the people awakened at dawn—behold! every cat was back at his accustomed hearth! Large and small, black, grey, striped, yellow and white, none was missing. Very sleek and fat did the cats appear, and sonorous with purring content. The citizens talked with one another of the affair, and marveled not a little. Old Kranon again insisted that it was the dark folk who had taken them, since cats did not return alive from the cottage of the ancient man and his wife. But all agreed on one thing: that the refusal of all the cats to eat their portions of meat or drink their saucers of milk was exceedingly curious. And for two whole days the sleek, lazy cats of Ulthar would touch no food, but only doze by the fire or in the sun.
It was fully a week before the villagers noticed that no lights were appearing at dusk in the windows of the cottage under the trees. Then the lean Nith remarked that no one had seen the old man or his wife since the night the cats were away. In another week the burgomaster decided to overcome his fears and call at the strangely silent dwelling as a matter of duty, though in so doing he was careful to take with him Shang the blacksmith and Thul the cutter of stone as witnesses. And when they had broken down the frail door they found only this: two cleanly picked human skeletons on the earthen floor, and a number of singular beetles crawling in the shadowy corners.
There was subsequently much talk among the burgesses of Ulthar. Zath, the coroner, disputed at length with Nith, the lean notary; and Kranon and Shang and Thul were overwhelmed with questions. Even little Atal, the innkeeper’s son, was closely questioned and given a sweetmeat as reward. They talked of the old cotter and his wife, of the caravan of dark wanderers, of small Menes and his black kitten, of the prayer of Menes and of the sky during that prayer, of the doings of the cats on the night the caravan left, and of what was later found in the cottage under the dark trees in the repellent yard.
And in the end the burgesses passed that remarkable law which is told of by traders in Hatheg and discussed by travelers in Nir; namely, that in Ulthar no man may kill a cat.
THE CAT WITH THE TULIP FACE, by A. R. Morlan
AUTHOR’S NOTE: This novelette is a prequel to my novel The Amulet, and takes place in late 1986, a year before the events in the novel.
* * * *
“When it’s time to die, let us not discover that we have never lived.”
—Henry David Thoreau
Meaow.
“Kitty-kitty?” Arlene asked the humid early morning air, as she glanced up and down Wisconsin Street. Darkness welled in recessed shop doorways, and gave an inky sheen to the large display windows. The greenish-white street lamps were too far away to cast much of a glow where she stood, midway between the tacky novelty shop and the building which used to be the Ewerton Savings and Loan but was now a lawyer’s office (after the Century 21 Realty office came and went).
A fine mist settled on Arlene’s exposed face and forearms; she rolled down the plastic backed canvas sleeves on her outsized slicker and tried calling again. “C’mon, Kitty-kitty. It’s okay, I won’t hurt you.” She could hear the cat (kitten? It sounded young) crying, but the humidity in the sluggish July air made it difficult to pinpoint just where its cries originated.
Meeeaow!
Closer and louder now. Arlene walked forward slowly, heading toward the tiny diner that used-to-be-a-clothing-boutique to the north of her. In the distance she heard a truck’s many wide tires snick-splash along one of the side streets behind her. At this hour of the morning—just before four—the only things moving on the streets of Ewerton were out of state truckers, the last stragglers coming home after an all-night party held in one of those walk-up apartments nestled above the department stores, the occasional stray animal—and Arlene.
Plastic mesh shopping bags in hand, Arlene had Ewerton all to herself in the mornings. She was the Queen of Ewerton Avenue, the Owner of Wisconsin Street. And the Duchess of the Dumpsters, she often joked with herself as she leaned into the back-of-the-store Dumpsters, her fingers sensitive to the feel of aluminum cans, the odd piece of discarded merchandise, or even the past-its-due-date box or carton of food.
And stray animals. Often, she’d unintentionally scare a wild cat or something smaller and quicker that she wasn’t about to try to scrutinize in order to determine its species. And some mornings, she had footsore canine company for the length of a few blocks, until a slobbery tongue touched her hand in farewell and the empty streets rang with the sound of dog nails doing a chitinous tap-dance on the concrete.
But these had been animals, hungry, tired, or just plain lonely enough to allow Arlene to pick them up and scavenge them like an aluminum can, or an old box of breakfast cereal. Not that she thought of her pets as refuse, or cast-offs, though. Arlene treated all of her “finds” with respect, be they inanimate or animate. The aluminum cans were washed, then carefully crushed flat, prior to their storage in black plastic bags in the basement (and their subsequent return to the recycling truck come Thursday). The rust-dotted kitchen tools, chipped dishes, and one-left cards of kitchen magnets or corn-on-the-cob servers were diligently scrubbed, mended or matched with other odd-lot items waiting in Arlene’s already cluttered kitchen drawers.
As for the animals…Arlene was a couple years short of being able to collect her own Social Security, but what with her late husband’s SS checks, and the modest sum he’d left in the bank for her, she had just enough to pay her utility bills plus her considerable veterinarian bills. If a cat or dog needed food, she bought it name brands plus those expensive treats in the fancy little cans or boxes, while she ate weeks-old spareribs from the IGA dumpster. Should the animal need flea shampoo, she used only a half a tablet of denture cleaner in her chopper-hopper each day. When she wrote out the checks for her animals’ shots each year, she didn’t write out a check to cover the cost of her Ben-Gay and non-aspirin.
If you take it in, you take care of it. That thought alone was enough to banish any temptation to pamper herself. She had lived over sixty good years, years of plenty. And I still have plenty, she stubbornly told herself many a morning. Only difference is, I don’t have to pay for all of it. That some of her finds—the four-legged ones—ended up costing her money she really couldn’t afford to spend so freely never fazed Arlene, living alone as she did, with no children or grandchildren—or even many friends, for that matter—Arlene considered the love of her “babies” payment in full, thank you. While she knew that she’d have to make the little she had last until her own SS kicked in, Arlene had long ago decided that a life lived without giving, to someone, wasn’t a life.
Her years with Don had proved that to be a fact.
So there she was, an old woman with ridiculously thin ankles which vanished in a pair of velcro-strapped running shoes, walking briskly down the street, her good ear cocked and waiting for the next Meaow. She walked faster, both out of need and urgency. With the gradual lightening of the sky, it was urgent that she get home before the delivery trucks began to arrive at the stores, and the graveyard shifts at the sash and door and paper mill were let out. And she knew that that cat (kitten?) needed her.
Six years of combing the pre-dawn streets had taught Arlene that for a little animal, alone and scared, dawn is too late. With the coming of light come cars with drivers who speed up when they see something small and frantic trying to cross the street. Arlene had toed many a pulp-headed animal to the curb during her “normal” shopping hours.
But if she could find this cat before the coming of the light—
Meeeaow!
That was why it was hard to get a fix on its cries—they came from above Arlene. Looking up, she saw the kitten sitting on the high window ledge of the dentist’s office close to the intersection of Wisconsin Street and Fourth Avenue East. That window set in the gray stone facade was a good five feet off the ground, a small window with a deep ledge, recessed enough for a tiny kitten to hunker down close to the glass.
“Aw, c’mon, kitty, you can come closer,
I won’t hurt you,” Arlene coaxed, as she stood on tiptoes and reached for the kitten. At five foot four, she was just tall enough to brush the animal’s silky coat with the tips of her blunt fingers. The kitten was warm, exceptionally so for an animal which had most likely been sitting on that ledge all night. Its fur was as fine-textured as washed silk; as the kitten breathed its fur undulated like wind-whipped draperies, a most peculiar sensation.
The kitten stopped crying, and edged closer to Arlene; two huge black ears surmounted a mottled white and black wedge of a face. It looked to be about three months old. In the spill of the street-lamp, Arlene noticed that the kitten’s eyes were tiny, baby-like. They glittered against the surrounding white fur like pebbles in the bottom of a fish tank, all watery and rounded.
Then, as if it had sized Arlene up and found her satisfactory, the kitten jumped off the ledge into her waiting arms. Upon impact, it began to purr, a loud rumble that radiated from its chest outward, making the ribs and skin vibrate. Arlene undid the top snap on her slicker and tucked the kitten inside; as she did so, her fingers brushed against the base of the kitten’s tail. Gonads the size of large peas filled the scrotum.
As she positioned her left arm under the kitten, Arlene thought, Awfully big down there for such a tiny baby boy…must be older than I thought. Arlene’s bag of cans clunked against her leg as she walked, but soon the kitten’s purr drowned out even that noise.
By the time she was halfway to her home on Polk Avenue, the kitten was kneading her stomach.
* * * *
Not only was the kitten older than Arlene had first guessed, he was…uglier than she’d realized. When she first brought him home, she hurried past the cats and dogs winding around her legs and shoved the wiggling kitten into the bathroom; she dreaded having to give all ten of her animals flea baths just in case the new arrival was crawling with the little brown varmints. After dumping some food into a saucer (also scavenged, a little white bowl with a childish picture of a spaceman on the moon in the bottom), she opened the bathroom door long enough to shove the food inside and slammed it before the kitten ran out. (There were litter pans positioned all over the house, including the bathroom, so she wasn’t worried about any accidents after the kitten ate.) But she didn’t get a good look at her newest find until after she’d fed her other friends, then brewed a cup of Earl Gray for herself.
While the other animals whined, scratched, hissed, and panted outside, Arlene quickly opened the door and slipped into the bathroom. The kitten was sitting on the toilet tank, in a Sphinx pose. Sitting sideways on the toilet seat, her back to the bathtub, Arlene said as she stroked the kitten’s seal-sleek fur, “Gracious, you are the most awful looking kitty I’ve seen yet.” The kitten blinked a kitty-kiss at her and began purring, as if she’d just said he was the most beautiful animal in the universe.
The kitten’s capacity for affection wasn’t in keeping with his appearance; not only were his ears way too big, so huge they almost met in the center of his upper head, but his face was all…wrong.
The too-small green eyes were only the beginning. The kitten’s forehead and nose were all of one line, unbroken by dips, bumps, or anything. Just a straight slope from the too-close ears down to the nose leather. Arlene’s cats, while not purebreds, were similar to each other in that their noses all dipped down parallel to their eyes in a pleasing sloping “S” curve. Years ago, Arlene had a cat named Louie who closely resembled an Oriental Shorthair, and even his nose had had a slight dip to it.
But the kitten’s nose resembled something drawn with a straight-edge. Head-on he looked even worse, for his white face was marred in the middle by an irregular blotch which completely obscured his nose, leather and all. When Arlene glanced at him fast, it, almost seemed that he had no nose at all. And his tiny, slightly bulging eyes didn’t add to his beauty, either.
Gently pulling back the kitten’s gums, she said, “Just want to check your teeth…good boy.” Wiping off cat spittle onto her smock top, Arlene frowned to herself. This kitten had his canines. Top and bottom, almost fully grown in. Which made him.… “Hum, lemme see—I found Guy-Pie when he was about five months old, and he had his canines” (not to mention over a hundred fleas which Arlene had drowned in a jelly-jar glass) “so you’re pretty close to that age, aren’t you?”
The kitten purred in agreement. Arlene patted his sides; the ribs stood out like the tines of a serving fork held an inch above a table. Pitiful. The skin was sucked in close to his rump and guts, and his stifle bones felt like marbles under Arlene’s hard fingertips. And his all-black tail resembled a licorice whip.
Outside, from where they waited in the hallway, the other cats rattled the door by sticking their paws under the jamb, while the dog nails made staccato scrabblings on the linoleum floor. The kitten ignored them, intent only on Arlene, who had owned, loved, and buried enough cats to know what that look meant.
Like it or not, Arlene had a baby on her hands, a baby who had found himself a new Momma.
Suddenly, the kitten sighed, reached for her hand with one huge-toed white paw, and rested his head against the worn blue toilet tank cover. A smile worked its way onto Arlene’s wrinkled face, and stayed there. Patting the kitten’s flanks, she whispered, “Why do I get the feeling that there’s going to be a lot of jealous animals around the house, hm?”
The kitten blinked his minuscule eyes in reply, and purred louder than ever.
* * * *
Arlene knew from experience never to take an animal in to the vet’s office on a Monday; not that she had much else to fill her days, but she still hated to waste her time sitting in a noisy office full of yippy-yappy hunting dogs and poodles whose nails needed clipping.
She did call the veterinarian office (“Not another one,” the receptionist had half-joked) to make an appointment for the next day; stool test, full shots, the works. And in between making sure that her other pets were given extra hugs and soft chewy treats, she spent time in the bathroom with the kitten (who had the most indelicate habit of crawling into her lap while she was seated on the toilet; she had to hold him so he wouldn’t fall through to the water in the bowl).
The more she looked at him, the less offensive his face became to her; by evening he was almost cute. The black parts of his fur glistened with delicate rainbow colors, like the wings of a cowbird or blackbird, or the surface of certain black-red petaled flowers. And the shape of his face reminded her of something…by that night, when his cries pulled her from her bed, and she had to try to show him—again—how to use a litter pan (her efforts were wasted though, since he let his bladder go on the toilet tank cover, and did the other thing after jumping into the sink), Arlene finally realized what the kitten reminded her of.…a tulip. One of those bicolor ones, with the sharp points on the top of the petals, and a narrow base where the flower joined the stem.
After he finally did his duty, and Arlene scooped the b.m. into an old yogurt cup for tomorrow’s test, she came back into the bathroom and held the kitten for a few minutes before going back to bed herself.
“Thass all right,” she crooned, hugging the scrawny kitten, “Thass all right, you’re a good boy.” The kitten kneaded her shoulder; there was something odd about the way he did that, but Arlene was too tired to figure it out. She’d have to ask the vet about it tomorrow.
Morning was only a few hours away, and there was scavenging to do.
* * * *
“You know, you ought to set yourself up as an official shelter,” the veterinarian joked as she looked in the kitten’s huge ears, checking for ear mites. “That one passes inspection, let’s see the other one.” The vet’s dark-rimmed fingers poked in the cavernous depths of the kitten’s left ear. Arlene shuddered; she knew that both the vets had to tend to area cows, and horses, which meant that no matter how often they washed their hands their nails were still stained, but dark nails always gave her pause.
“I don’t think I could stand working in a shelter. I’d want to keep
all the animals,” she finally replied, as the young vet began to palpitate the kitten’s abdomen. As her fingers worked their way over the fine white and black fur, Dr. Hraber said, “I thought you did that already, Mrs. Campbell.”
“Only the ones I find. I don’t think I could cope with ones brought in from all over.” Talk about abandoned animals made Arlene uneasy, bringing back memories of all the cats and dogs she’d either picked up or had wandered on her porch. Like Guy-Pie, with his rough pads and way of grabbing whole chunks out of the food bowl and running halfway across the room with them before he’d eat. Big gentle Rowdy, her leather collar stripped of its tags and attached name-tag, just an old yellow hunting dog no one wanted on the hunt anymore. Bubba, huddled shivering next to the Coke machine at the Red Owl, chunks of cow manure stuck in his white fur, his ear tips chewed by God knew what, too beat and broken to even let out a meaow.
And those were only the animals she had found. Arlene had never answered one of those “Free Kittens” or “Puppies to Give Away” ads in the Ewerton Herald; for her, looking at them all was wanting to take them all home. True, she worried about people from labs or pit bull breeders coming to take the little animals, but as long as she didn’t see them, she wouldn’t let it pain her overmuch. She had her “children” to look after; if God saw fit to put one within her hearing or seeing, that was the animal she would take in. Just as she picked up cans or went rooting for week-old bread in back of the IGA. There was only so much she could do. Some things, unfortunately, were simply out of her hands.
The Second Cat Megapack: Frisky Feline Tales, Old and New Page 2
