Beasts of New York: A children's book for grown-ups

by Jon Evans

  The four cats turned to Zelina, whose small black form still huddled in the center of their circle.

  "Is it true?" the largest cat asked. "Do you claim to be the Queen of All Cats?"

  For a moment there was no response, and Patch feared the worst.

  Then Zelina rose and stared this largest cat in the face. Her fur bristled and her green eyes flashed like flames. She reeked of blood and rage.

  "I am the doomed queen," she said. "I am the exiled queen. I am the queen who loves her subjects even as they try to murder her. I am the queen who must kill, and kill, and kill again, until the highways flow with blood. I am the queen who speaks with tigers. I am the queen who has escaped dogs and foxes and humans and rats, but who will never escape her destiny. I am the queen who does not fear the death you bring, who will never beg for her life, who will die as a queen even as I am torn apart. Do with me what you will, you vicious and ignorant brutes, I am and I shall remain, the Queen of All Cats!"

  An awful silence seemed to hang over the whole island. Zelina deliberately turned her back on the cat she faced and walked slowly over to stand next to Patch. The four male cats did not try to prevent her.

  "Come," she said to Patch, "let us be gone."

  Patch wanted to flee from the cats at top speed, but he followed Zelina's lead, and instead they marched slowly away.

  "Wait!" one of the male cats cried out.

  Patch hesitated, but Zelina's stately walk did not waver.

  "Wait, please! Please, your majesty, we didn't know! Please, forgive us!"

  Zelina stopped and turned back to them.

  "Can you take us to the Great Avenue and the Center Kingdom?" she asked.

  he male cats looked at one another uncertainly.

  "It's a long way," said the largest of them, "very long."

  Zelina said, "Show us."

  And soon a somewhat disbelieving Patch found himself and Zelina walking along still-busy highways, led and escorted by four large male cats. It was very strange moving through the night, half-blinded. Human lights winked and flickered all around them, in mountains, in death machines, hanging from metal trees. The darkness seemed to sharpen Patch's nose, accentuated the city's rich and rotting symphony of smells. Wherever he smelled rats, he smelled fear as well; no rat wanted to be anywhere near five cats.

  They walked all through the night. When day came, they had reached a plain that was mostly concrete but had dribs and drabs of greenery, and a few trees. Patch slept up a small maple tree; Zelina and her companions stayed at its base. By the time Patch woke up, the sun had traversed most of the sky, and three more cats had joined Zelina's retinue. It was exceedingly strange to wake up so very late in the day. His whole body felt queasy, and he hardly ate before descending to the base of the tree and beginning another journey through the night towards his home.

  3. Humans

  In the middle of the night the city's human walkways were largely, but not entirely, deserted. Some humans reeled past stinking of fermentation, their feet falling so randomly that they were dangerous to be near, and Patch marvelled at their uncanny ability to walk on two legs. Some walked quietly, looking ahead of them, seemingly ignorant of all the world around them. Some - usually lone humans, or pairs - crouched to gawk at the spectacle of eight cats and a squirrel journeying through the night. Some slumped on the walkway, lying wrapped in woven covers like caterpillars in a cocoon, or sitting with their backs against mountain walls.

  Late in the night they passed one of these sitting humans, a hairy-faced male dimly illuminated by a hanging globe of light. He smelled of filth. He seemed asleep, but as they passed, this human's eyes opened, and fixed on Patch: and the human said, in bad and broken but comprehensible Mammal, "Hello, squirrel."

  Patch froze, utterly amazed, and Zelina and her seven cats halted as well.

  "Hello, squirrel," the human repeated. The phrase required no pheromones, only noise, the dipping motion of a head, and a scrabbling motion of forelegs. The human's sounds and actions were imperfect but unmistakable.

  "Hello, squirrel," it said again.

  "Hello," Patch replied after a moment. He was ready to run.

  "Hello, squirrel."

  "Hello, human." Patch had not thought he would ever speak those words.

  "Squirrel eat food?"

  After a moment Patch said, "I am a little hungry."

  The human seemed confused - and indeed he was, for hunger was a concept communicated with pheromones, and humans have long ago lost that part of animal speech.

  "Squirrel eat food?" the human repeated.

  Patch decided to answer in kind. "Squirrel eat food."

  The human reached into its ragged coverings, and Patch tensed, but when the hand emerged it held a paper bag that smelled like heaven. The human dipped a hand into the bag and let fall a heap of little seeds onto the walkway.

  "Be careful," Zelina warned Patch. "It could be a trap. It could be poison."

  "Good food," the human assured Patch, and began to eat from the bag itself.

  Patch stared incredulously at the human. Had the human actually understood Zelina's warning? And the way it was eating - why, this human was eating like a squirrel did, with rapid, twitching, repetitive motions, stopping between bites to look quickly back and forth. This human moved and even smelled a little like an animal, like a creature of instinct, not a creature of thought.

  Patch began to eat the seeds. Then he began to devour them. He did not think he had ever tasted anything so wonderful in all his life.

  "Try it! Eat!" he told Zelina.

  She took a mouthful, crunched, and shrugged; to her it was nothing special. But to Patch it was the finest food he had ever encountered. When he had finished he looked hopefully up to the human, and the human let fall another handful of seeds, and Patch ate until his belly had no room for more.

  "Good squirrel," the human said. "You stay, good squirrel? You stay?"

  "No, I'm sorry," Patch said, with genuine regret. "I must go home."

  Home was a pheromone concept too.

  The human's face wrinkled. "Me no stay," it said. "Me always go. Me go, me go, me go again. Me always go. You come back, good squirrel. I see you more."

  "I see you more," Patch agreed.

  Almost immediately after they left the strange human behind, Patch was barely able to believe that the encounter had really happened.

  "I didn't think humans could speak to animals at all," he said to Zelina.

  Zelina said, "I have lived with humans almost all my life, and I have never heard of it happening before."

  Patch thought of Siva the tiger and the 'human brother' Siva had spoken of. He reminded himself, when he returned to the Center Kingdom, to find Daffa the pigeon, and find some way to deliver a ball of glass to Siva's human brother.

  The sky above them began to slowly brighten, almost imperceptibly, with the first glimmerings of impending dawn. Patch realized how tired he was. Zelina and the largest cat, who was named Alabast, held a brief conference.

  "Alabast says we will soon reach a square of trees and grass," Zelina said to Patch. "We can sleep there. If we run all through the night that follows, we can reach the Great Avenue before dawn, and your Center Kingdom is only a little beyond."

  Patch did not reply. Instead he sat back on his hindlegs, his eyes suddenly wide and alert, and sniffed the air.

  "Patch?" Zelina asked. "Patch, did you hear me?"

  "He's here," Patch said. "By the full moon, he's here right now. I can smell him." He ran a little ways along the walkway, his nose to the ground, towards a set of tiled steps that descended into the underground. "His scent is fresh, he went down there just now!"

  "Who was here?" Zelina asked, bemused. "Who are you talking about?"

  Patch said, his voice quiet but passionate: "Sniffer."

  Then he pursued his enemy's scent down the steps into the underworld.

  4. Follow the Enemy

  The underworld was painfull
y bright. The stairs led down into a large chamber with tiled walls and concrete floors. The ceiling's fast-flickering lights reflected off the white tiles, giving Patch a headache. A line of widely spaced block-shaped metal things, from which spokes and bars protruded, stretched across one end of the chamber; beyond them, Patch saw another strip of concrete floor, and then darkness. A human sat in a tiny boxlike building at the end of the series of metal things. The air down here smelled old and strange and musty, and it was laced with Sniffer's scent.

  There was plenty of room between the metal blocks. The area on the other side was a concrete strip that extended for a considerable distance to either side, but ended only a few dozen squirrel-paces beyond the blocks, at a cliff that dropped down into darkness. Another concrete platform was visible on the other side of the dark abyss that smelled of smoke and metal. Pillars were stationed at regular intervals all around this underground space, angular metal pillars that rose from the abyss and circular concrete ones along the platform. Patch didn't like having something solid between himself and the sky, not at all, but Sniffer's scent was fresh, and it led him to his left, along the platform, towards the tiled wall at which it ended. The abyss continued past the platform end, became a tunnel into darkness.

  He was stopped suddenly by a horrible noise of grinding and screeching, the most awful thing Patch had ever heard. It grew louder, came closer, until his ears actually hurt. A great wind began to blow. Then lights flickered and a colossal machine emerged from the tunnel. Lightning flashed beneath its metal feet, and its screams were deafening. It was made of a dozen huge, solid-walled, shining metal cages, all linked together in a long line, and through its many windows Patch caught glimpses of a few human shapes. The machine ran on one of four sets of metal rails that ran along the base of the abyss. Patch was very glad that it shrieked past without stopping and soon disappeared into the other end of the tunnel.

  He still smelled Sniffer. He also smelled rats; many, many rats. Patch hesitated. Then he followed Sniffer's scent right to the end of the platform. He walked right to the edge of the abyss and peered around the corner of the wall, down into the tunnel, and at the farthest edge of his vision, he saw the silhouette of a squirrel surrounded by rats. He heard fragments of voices: "birds… battle… slaughter… king… Ramble."

  Then the squirrel stiffened, sniffed the air, and turned to look straight at Patch.

  "By the moon in her stars," Sniffer said, amazed. "Patch son of Silver."

  Patch winced at his own stupidity. He should have known that Sniffer's extraordinary nose would soon discover his presence. He realized he had no idea what he was going to do now that he had found Sniffer. A concrete ramp led down into the tunnel, but he certainly didn't intend to charge at Sniffer, not with all those rats beside him, rats with whom Sniffer was obviously conspiring.

  Patch heard scuttling sounds from above. He looked up. Something, no, many somethings were moving on the framework of metal girders that hung high above the platform and just below the ceiling. He realized these girders acted as a sky-road for rats. Many, many rats.

  Patch turned and ran - but from the other end of the platform, and from little holes in the platform wall to his right, rats were beginning to emerge, huge rats nearly as big as Patch, warping and contorting their bodies to squeeze through the small holes into which Patch could never fit. Patch heard rats moving about in the abyss to his left as well.

  "Hold him!" a rat voice cried from behind Patch. A familiar rat voice. "I would speak to this squirrel before he dies."

  A wall of rats formed up across the platform about two-thirds of the way back towards the metal blocks. Patch halted and looked around wildly, seeking some avenue of escape. None was apparent. A river of rats was streaming onto the platform behind from the tunnel below. Sniffer was among them. There were rats above, rats below, rats on both sides. And he recognized the rat that strutted next to Sniffer, the largest rat he had ever seen. Other rats were squinting and looking away from the lights and tiled walls, but this rat seemed unfazed by brightness.

  "Patch son of Silver," said Lord Snout. "You're supposed to be hawkmeat. How is it that you're still alive?"

  Patch ignored Snout and looked at Sniffer. "You led them to Jumper, didn't you? You gave them the food we all buried so we would starve. You told the hawk where to find me."

  Sniffer looked very uncomfortable.

  "Didn't you?" Patch demanded. His voice was brittle with rage and terror. "Tell me! Tell me, you traitor, murderer, brother to rats!"

  "Patch," Sniffer said, "you must understand, everything I did was for the greater good. We couldn't go on the way we were. Certain sacrifices had to be made. And those sacrifices included lives. Necessity is a cruel and terrible thing. But it cannot be avoided."

  They stared at each other in silence for a moment.

  "Enough talk," Snout said. "I suppose it doesn't matter how you came to be down here. I promised you some time ago that I would eat your eyes from your skull. Now -"

  Then Snout fell silent and took two sudden steps back. He was staring past Patch's shoulder.

  Patch turned around just in time to see the charge of Zelina and her seven cats.

  The wall of rats between Patch and the cats broke almost immediately, and suddenly the platform was a screeching, squeaking, maelstrom of rats, running panicked from the cats, scurrying past and around Patch as if he was an inanimate obstacle. For a few moments Patch couldn't move, the rats were too thick around him.

  "Hold!" Snout bellowed. "In the name of the King Beneath, attack! Attack and kill them all!"

  The rats began to reform around Snout just as the cats reached Patch, their mouths and claws smeared with rat blood. They didn't have time to run. Snout countercharged, Sniffer beside him, and the rat army followed.

  Patch gaped at the rat nearest him, the rat running straight towards him, fangs open and glistening. For a moment he was too frozen with fear to fight.

  Then Alabast leaped into the oncoming wave of rats. The big white cat raked his claws across the eyes of the rat coming at Patch, while biting another and knocking two more off their feet with his pale and massive body, and the battle turned into a yowling, screaming melee, a chaos of blood and fangs. Patch howled too, with growing fury as much as fear, and when another rat was thrust towards Patch by the current of rat-flesh behind him, Patch lunged forward and bit its throat. His mouth filled with sour blood and Patch immediately let go and spit it out. The rat screeched with pain and fled.

  Through the chaos Patch saw Sniffer not far away, and Patch felt his rage blossom within him like a flower, expand into an awful and terrible thing like a burning sun in his heart. He charged through the sea of squalling rats towards the squirrel that had once been his friend. He was close, so close, he could see Sniffer's shocked and frightened eyes, and Patch opened his mouth to bite and charged faster -

  Something white-hot burned into Patch's left hindleg. He screamed and turned to see Snout's yellow fangs sunk deep into Patch's flesh. Then Alabast loomed above them, and Snout released Patch and fled from the big white cat. The rat army followed their leader and pulled back from the battle. But they soon reformed a short distance away.

  A dozen rat corpses lay on the floor, and a dozen more who still lived but could not move twitched in agony, and Patch and all the cats still stood. But there were still teeming masses of rats on either side, and all the cats were bleeding, most from multiple wounds. It was apparent that Patch and the cats could never win this battle, nor fight their way back outside before being overrun.

  5. Home

  In the blood and terror of the battle Patch had not noticed a faint change in the character of the light around them. Now he saw an intensifying glow in the tunnel's distant depths, like a fire that has found new fuel. A powerful wind began to blow from the tunnel, ruffling the fur on Patch's tail. A huge noise of clanking and clattering grew audible, and then louder, and then so loud neither squirrel nor rat nor cat could hear a thin
g as a chain of shining solid-walled cages the size of human houses shrieked out of the darkness, so close to the platform edge that this machine on rails was like a steel wall moving along the length of the platform. Light shone from the windows that lined the cages. The machine screeched and shuddered to a halt. Then dozens of human-sized doors slid open along the length of the platform, revealing the cages' painfully bright interior, lined with benches occupied by a few slumped humans.

  "Hurry!" Zelina cried, and leaped into the nearest cage.

  Despite the fact they were surrounded by an army of rats this option had not even occurred to Patch. But the other cats followed her, and Patch scrambled in behind them. Snout and Sniffer approached the open doors uncertainly, followed by their army - but the several humans within leapt to their feet and began to cry out. The rats hesitated at the threshold.

  A strange two-note sound chimed, and the doors hissed shut, leaving the rats outside.

  The cage began to rattle forward, and they all staggered a little. Patch almost lost his balance and had an awful memory of sliding about on top of the big automobile that had carried them to the island, but then the cage's motion stabilized; it still shook violently, and made awful grinding noises as it moved, but was steady enough that they could all remain standing. The humans in the cage approached Patch and the cats, speaking to one another excitedly, but did not come too near. The cage slowed, and Patch and the cats skidded forward a little, and then it stopped, and the doors opened again - but this platform looked different, and there were no rats on it. Another human walked into the cage and stopped dead, staring at Patch and the cats. Then the two-note chime sounded again, and the doors hissed shut, and the cage began to rattle forward.

  Patch's leg began to hurt again where Snout had bitten him. The excitement of battle had doused the pain for a time, but now it began to throb like fire, and it hurt even worse when he had to use the strength of his legs to stay upright as the cage once more decelerated and stopped at a different platform.