by Fritz Leiber
He often wished that old Horsemeat’s two older cats, Ashurbanipal and Cleopatra, had not gone to the country to live with Old Horsemeat’s mother. They would have shown the evil bushwackers a thing or two!
* * * *
Because of Scarface and the Mad Eunuch, Gummitch spent most of his time indoors. Since a cat is made for a half-and-half existence—half in the wild forest, half in the secure cave—he took to brooding quite morbidly. He thought over-much of ghost cats in the mirror world and of the Skeleton Cat who starved to death in a locked closet and similar grisly legends. He immersed himself in racial memories, not so much of Ancient Egypt where cats were prized as minions of the lovely cat-goddess Bast and ceremoniously mummified at the end of tranquil lives, as of the Middle Ages, when European mankind waged a genocidal war against felines as being the familiars of witches. (He thought briefly of turning Kitty-Come-Here into a witch, but his hypnotic staring and tentative ritualistic mewing only made her fidgety.) And he devoted more and more time to devising dark versions of the theory of transmigration, picturing cats as Silent Souls, Gagged People of Great Talent, and the like.
He had become too self-conscious to re-enter often the make-believe world of the kitten, yet his imagination remained as active as ever. It was a truly frustrating predicament.
More and more often and for longer periods he retired to meditate in a corrugated cardboard shoebox, open only at one end. The cramped quarters made it easier for him to think. Old Horsemeat called it the Cat Orgone Box after the famed Orgone Energy Accumulators of the late wildcat psychoanalyst Dr. Wilhelm Reich.
If only, Gummitch thought, he could devise some way of objectifying the intimations of beauty that flitted through his darkly clouded mind! Now, on the evening of the sunny day when he had backed away from his water bowl, he attacked the problem anew. He knew he had been fleetingly on the verge of a great idea, an idea involving water, light and movement. An idea he had unfortunately forgotten. He closed his eyes and twitched his nose. I must concentrate, he thought to himself, concentrate.…
* * * *
Next day Kitty-Come-Here remembered her idea about Gummitch’s water. She boiled two cupfuls in a spotless enamelware saucepan, letting it cool for half an hour before using it to replace the seemingly offensive water in the young cat’s bowl. It was only then she noticed that the bowl had been upset.
She casually assumed that big-footed Old Horsemeat must have been responsible for the accident, or possibly one of the two children—darting Sissy or blundering Baby. She wiped the bowl and filled it with the water she had dechlorinated.
“Come here, Kitty, come here,” she called to Gummitch, who had been watching her actions attentively from the dining room door. The young cat stayed where he was. “Oh, well, if you want to be coy,” she said, shrugging her shoulders.
There was a mystery about the spilled water. It had apparently disappeared entirely, though the day seemed hardly dry enough for total evaporation. Then she saw it standing in a puddle by the wall fully ten feet away from the bowl. She made a quick deduction and frowned a bit worriedly.
“I never realized the kitchen floor sloped that much,” she told Old Horsemeat after dinner. “Maybe some beams need to be jacked up in the basement. I’d hate to think of collapsing into it while I cooked dinner.”
“I’m sure this house finished all its settling thirty years ago,” her husband assured her hurriedly. “That slope’s always been there.”
“Well, if you say so,” Kitty-Come-Here allowed doubtfully.
Next day she found Gummitch’s bowl upset again and the remains of the boiled water in a puddle across the room. As she mopped it up, she began to do some thinking without benefit of Concentration Box.
* * * *
That evening, after Old Horsemeat and Sissy had vehemently denied kicking into the water bowl or stepping on its edge, she voiced her conclusions. “I think Gummitch upsets it,” she said. “He’s rejecting it. It still doesn’t taste right to him and he wants to show us.”
“Maybe he only likes it after it’s run across the floor and got seasoned with household dust and the corpses of germs,” suggested Old Horsemeat, who believed most cats were bohemian types.
“I’ll have you know I scrub that linoleum,” Kitty-Come-Here asserted.
“Well, with detergent and scouring powder, then,” Old Horsemeat amended resourcefully.
Kitty-Come-Here made a scornful noise. “I still want to know where he gets his liquids,” she said. “He’s been off milk for weeks, you know, and he only drinks a little broth when I give him that. Yet he doesn’t seem dehydrated. It’s a real mystery and—”
“Maybe he’s built a still in the attic,” Old Horsemeat interjected.
“—and I’m going to find the answers,” Kitty-Come-Here concluded, ignoring the facetious interruption. “I’m going to find out where he gets the water he does drink and why he rejects the water I give him. This time I’m going to boil it and put in a pinch of salt. Just a pinch.”
“You make animals sound more delicate about food and drink than humans,” Old Horsemeat observed.
“They probably are,” his wife countered. “For one thing they don’t smoke, or drink Martinis. It’s my firm belief that animals—cats, anyway—like good food just as much as we do. And the same sort of good food. They don’t enjoy canned catfood any more than we would, though they can eat it. Just as we could if we had to. I really don’t think Gummitch would have such a passion for raw horsemeat except you started him on it so early.”
“He probably thinks of it as steak tartare,” Old Horsemeat said.
Next day Kitty-Come-Here found her salted offering upset just as the two previous bowls had been.
* * * *
Such were the beginnings of the Great Spilled Water Mystery that preoccupied the human members of the Gummitch household for weeks. Not every day, but frequently, and sometimes two and three times a day, Gummitch’s little bowl was upset. No one ever saw the young cat do it. But it was generally accepted that he was responsible, though for a time Old Horsemeat had theories that he did not voice involving Sissy and Baby.
Kitty-Come-Here bought Gummitch a firm-footed rubber bowl for his water, though she hesitated over the purchase for some time, certain he would be able to taste the rubber. This bowl was found upset just like his regular china one and like the tin one she briefly revived from his kitten days.
All sorts of clues and possibly related circumstances were seized upon and dissected. For instance, after about a month of the mysterious spillings, Kitty-Come-Here announced, “I’ve been thinking back and as far as I can remember it never happens except on sunny days.”
“Oh, Good Lord!” Old Horsemeat reacted.
Meanwhile Kitty-Come-Here continued to try to concoct a kind of water that would be palatable to Gummitch. As she continued without success, her formulas became more fantastic. She quit boiling it for the most part but added a pinch of sugar, a spoonful of beer, a few flakes of oregano, a green leaf, a violet, a drop of vanilla extract, a drop of iodine.…
“No wonder he rejects the stuff,” Old Horsemeat was tempted to say, but didn’t.
Finally Kitty-Come-Here, inspired by the sight of a greenly glittering rack of it at the supermarket, purchased a half gallon of bottled water from a famous spring. She wondered why she hadn’t thought of this step earlier—it certainly ought to take care of her haunting convictions about the unpalatableness of chlorine or fluorides. (She herself could distinctly taste the fluorides in the tap water, though she never mentioned this to Old Horsemeat.)
One other development during the Great Spilled Water Mystery was that Gummitch gradually emerged from depression and became quite gay. He took to dancing cat schottisches and gigues impromptu in the living room of an evening and so forgot his dignity as to battle joyously with the vacuum-cleaner dragon when Old Horsemeat used one of the smaller attachments to curry him; the young cat clutched the hairy round brush to his stomach and ma
dly clawed it as it whuffled menacingly. Even the afternoon he came home with a shoulder gashed by the Mad Eunuch he seemed strangely light-hearted and debonair.
* * * *
The Mystery was abruptly solved one sunny Sunday afternoon. Going into the bathroom in her stocking feet, Kitty-Come-Here saw Gummitch apparently trying to drown himself in the toilet. His hindquarters were on the seat but the rest of his body went down into the bowl. Coming closer, she saw that his forelegs were braced against the opposite side of the bowl, just above the water surface, while his head thrust down sharply between his shoulders. She could distinctly hear rhythmic lapping.
To tell the truth, Kitty-Come-Here was rather shocked. She had certain rather fixed ideas about the delicacy of cats. It speaks well for her progressive grounding that she did not shout at Gummitch but softly summoned her husband.
By the time Old Horsemeat arrived the young cat had refreshed himself and was coming out of his “well” with a sudden backward undulation. He passed them in the doorway with a single mew and upward look and then made off for the kitchen.
The blue and white room was bright with sunlight. Outside the sky was blue and the leaves were rustling in a stiff breeze. Gummitch looked back once, as if to make sure his human congeners had followed, mewed again, and then advanced briskly toward his little bowl with the air of one who proposes to reveal all mysteries at once.
Kitty-Come-Here had almost outdone herself. She had for the first time poured him the bottled water, and she had floated a few rose petals on the surface.
Gummitch regarded them carefully, sniffed at them, and then proceeded to fish them out one by one and shake them off his paw. Old Horsemeat repressed the urge to say, “I told you so.”
When the water surface was completely free and winking in the sunlight, Gummitch curved one paw under the side of the bowl and jerked.
Half the water spilled out, gathered itself, and then began to flow across the floor in little rushes, a silver ribbon sparkling with sunlight that divided and subdivided and reunited as it followed the slope. Gummitch crouched to one side, watching it intensely, following its progress inch by inch and foot by foot, almost pouncing on the little temporary pools that formed, but not quite touching them. Twice he mewed faintly in excitement.
* * * *
“He’s playing with it,” Old Horsemeat said incredulously.
“No,” Kitty-Come-Here countered wide-eyed, “he’s creating something. Silver mice. Water-snakes. Twinkling vines.”
“Good Lord, you’re right,” Old Horsemeat agreed. “It’s a new art form. Would you call it water painting? Or water sculpture? Somehow I think that’s best. As if a sculptor made mobiles out of molten tin.”
“It’s gone so quickly, though,” Kitty-Come-Here objected, a little sadly. “Art ought to last. Look, it’s almost all flowed over to the wall now.”
“Some of the best art forms are completely fugitive,” Old Horsemeat argued. “What about improvisation in music and dancing? What about jam sessions and shadow figures on the wall? Gummitch can always do it again—in fact, he must have been doing it again and again this last month. It’s never exactly the same, like waves or fires. But it’s beautiful.”
“I suppose so,” Kitty-Come-Here said. Then coming to herself, she continued, “But I don’t think it can be healthy for him to go on drinking water out of the toilet. Really.”
Old Horsemeat shrugged. He had an insight about the artistic temperament and the need to dig for inspiration into the smelly fundamentals of life, but it was difficult to express delicately.
Kitty-Come-Here sighed, as if bidding farewell to all her efforts with rose petals and crystalline bottled purity and vanilla extract and the soda water which had amazed Gummitch by faintly spitting and purring at him.
“Oh, well,” she said, “I can scrub it out more often, I suppose.”
Meanwhile, Gummitch had gone back to his bowl and, using both paws, overset it completely. Now, nose a-twitch, he once more pursued the silver streams alive with suns, refreshing his spirit with the sight of them. He was fretted by no problems about what he was doing. He had solved them all with one of his characteristically sharp distinctions: there was the sacred water, the sparklingly clear water to create with, and there was the water with character, the water to drink.
A BIT OF THE DARK WORLD
Originally published in Fantastic Stories of Imagination, February 1962
I
“There was a crack in his head and a little hit of the Dark World came through and pressed him to death.”
—Rudyard Kipling
The Phantom Rickshaw
The antique-seeming dip-nosed black Volks touring car with its driver and two other passengers besides myself was buzzing up a saddle ridge of the Santa Monica Mountains, swinging close past the squat brush-choked peaks with their strange up-jutting worn rocky pinnacles that looked like primeval monoliths or robed and hooded stone monsters.
We were moving with top down and slowly enough to glimpse sharply the occasional little pale lizard skitter or grasshopper whirl up out of our way over the gray crushed stone.
It was a brilliantly clear day with compact clouds that emphasized the dizzying inverted depth of the blue sky. Between clouds, the sun was dazzlingly bright. More than once, as we headed straight toward the low-trending distant incandescent orb along a switchback stretch, I was stung by its beams and suffered the penalty of black patches swimming in my vision for a minute.
We had met only two cars and glimpsed only half a dozen houses and cabins since leaving the Pacific Coast Highway—a remarkable loneliness considering that Los Angeles was a scant hour’s drive behind us. It was a loneliness that had drawn Viki and myself apart with its silent intimations of mysteries and revelations, but not yet driven us together again (though there was a hint that it would) by reason of its menace.
Franz Kinzman, sitting in front to the left, and his neighbor who had volunteered to do this stretch of the driving (a Mr. Morton or Morgan or Mortenson, I wasn’t sure) seemed less affected by the landscape, as one would expect seeing they were both rather more familiar with it than Viki or I. Though it was hard to gauge reactions merely from the attitude of the back of Franz’s close-cropped gray head or Mr. M.’s faded brown duck hat pulled low to shade his eyes.
We had just passed that point of the Little Sycamore Canyon road where all the Santa Barbara Islands are visible like an argosy of blue-gray faintly granular clouds floating on the surface of the pale blue Pacific, when I suddenly remarked, for no profound major reason that I was aware of at the time, “I don’t suppose it’s any longer possible today to write a truly gripping story of supernatural horror—or for that matter to undergo a deeply disturbing experience of supernatural terror.”
Oh, there were enough minor reasons for the topic of my remark. Viki and I had worked in a couple of cheap monster movies, Franz Kinzman was a distinguished science-fantasy writer as well as a research psychologist, and the three of us had often gabbed about the weird in life and art. Also, there had been the faintest hint of mystery in Franz’s invitation to Viki and myself to spend with him the weekend of his return to Rim House after a month in LA. Finally, the abrupt transition from a teeming city to a forbidding expanse of nature always has an eerie sting—as Franz immediately brought up without turning his head.
“I’ll tell you the first condition for such an experience or artistic inspiration,” he said as the Volks entered a cool band of ‘shadow. “You’ve got to get away from the Hive.”
“The Hive?” Viki questioned, understanding very well what he meant, I was sure, but wanting to hear him talk and have him turn his head.
Franz obliged. He has a singularly handsome, thoughtful, noble face, hardly of our times, though looking all of his fifty years and with eyes dark-circled ever since the death of his wife and two sons in a jet crash a year ago.
“I mean the City,” he said as we buzzed into the sun again. “The human stamping ground
, where we’ve policemen to guard us and psychiatrists to monitor our minds and neighbors to jabber at us and where our ears are so full of the clack of the mass media that it’s practically impossible to think or sense or feel deeply anything that’s beyond humanity. Today the City, in its figurative sense, covers the whole world and the seas and the airways too and by anticipation the spaceways. I think what you mean, Glenn, is that it’s hard to get out of the City even in the wilderness.”
Mr. M. honked twice at a blind hairpin turn and put in the next remark. “I don’t know about that,” he said, hunching determinedly over the wheel, “but I should think you could find all the horror and terror you wanted, Mr. Seabury, without going away from home, though it’d make pretty grim films. I mean the Nazi death camps, brainwashing, sex murders, race riots, stuff like that, not to mention the atom bomb.”
“Right,” I countered, “but I’m talking about supernatural horror, which is almost the antithesis of even the worst human violence and cruelty. Hauntings, the suspension of scientific law, the intrusion of the unutterly alien, the sense of something listening at the rim of the cosmos or scratching faintly at the other side of the sky.”
As I said that, Franz looked around at me sharply with what seemed an expression of sudden excitement and apprehension, but at that moment the sun blinded me again and Viki said, “Doesn’t science fiction give you that, Glenn? I mean, horrors from other planets, the extraterrestrial monster?”
“No,” I told her, blinking at a fuzzy black globe that crawled across the mountains, “because the monster from Mars or wherever has (at least as visualized by the author) so many extra feet, so many tentacles, so many purple eyes—as real as the cop on the beat. Or if he’s a gas, he’s a describable gas. The exact sort of goon men will be meeting when the spaceships start traveling the starways. I’m thinking of something…well ghostly utterly weird.”
