Cat Under Fire

21

Her paws hardly touched the ground, skimming over the matted grass. Fear sent her flying uphill. There was no shelter above her, only a few tiny trees, hardly more than tall weeds. And behind her the dog gave a burst of speed, snatching at her tail. She jerked away, the tip of her tail blazing with pain. Scorched by terror, she desperately angled toward the nearest sapling, wondering if it would hold her. Leaping for the thin trunk, she swarmed up.

She was hardly above him when the dog hit the tree, bending it. She clung only inches above his snatching mouth, and the tree snapped back and forth under his weight, the little trunk whipping as if it would break She tried to climb higher but the thin branches bent. The bark was slick, the trunk too small to grip securely. The tree heaved. Its dry pods rattled, and the smell of bruised eucalyptus filled the wind. The dog leaped so high his face exploded at her, teeth snapping inches from her nose, and she could not back away.

She slashed him again, bloodied him good-his muzzle streamed blood, his ear was torn.

But she couldn't stay here. And if she leaped away, out of the tree, there was nowhere to run. All was open grass. Except, up the hill, maybe fifty feet above her, a drainpipe protruded from the hill. She could see its open end, oozing mud. She couldn't see inside very far, just the mouth of the drain, the slick-looking mud, the three smaller hills which clustered above it, probably grass-covered leavings of earth from when the drain was dug. The opening was plenty big enough for her, but maybe big enough for the dog as well. If she was caught in there with the dog crowding in behind her… Not a pleasant thought.

But she had no choice. The tree was going to break or bend to the ground under the beast's lunging weight. Assessing the distance, she scrabbled among the thin branches to get purchase, praying she could hit the hill far enough ahead for a successful fifty-foot sprint.

She crouched, every muscle taut, adrenaline pumping her heart like a jackhammer.

She shot over his head out of the tree, hit the ground running. He was on her, lunging to grab her. She spun and raked his face and rolled clear. Streaking for the pipe, she bolted in inches ahead of him and kept running, didn't look back, fled deep into the blackness, slipping in the mud, terrified he'd squeeze in behind her.

Deep in, when she didn't hear him behind her, she turned around in the narrow tunnel to look back.

The end of the pipe was blocked. The dog had his head in and one leg. He was trying to roll his shoulder in.

But he wasn't going to fit. If he pushed harder, he'd be stuck for sure. Smiling, she trotted back down the pipe toward him.

The sight of her sent him into a frenzy. He fought to push inside, his bloodied mouth slavering, his eyes blazing with rage.

She ran at him, hissing, raked him in the face, brought fresh blood flowing. Uselessly he fought to get at her, as she backed away. She turned, switched her tail at him, and moved deeper into the pipe.

Something was bothering her, a picture in her mind kept nudging for attention, she kept seeing the three mounds above at the base of the larger hill, two of them round, the third hill clipped off sharply, as if sliced straight down by a gigantic ax.

She shivered. Touched by images impossible to understand, she sat down in the mud, staring away into the darkness, seeing the hills from her dream.

Everything was the same, the dark tunnel, the sense of tight walls pressing in, threatening to crush her. Even the slime beneath her was the same, turgid and sour-smelling, just like the mud in her dream.

Drawing a shaky breath, she padded deeper in, drawn on shivering into the darkness.

Moving warily, ears tight against her head, tail low, she crept deep into the confining pipe, pulled in, swept by a powerful chill. And something lay ahead, something waited for her within the tunnel's black reach.

Far ahead something pale lay in the mud. She could see it now, and she wanted to turn and run.

As she drew closer, trying to understand what she was seeing, the pale form began to take shape. It was absolutely still, a vague scattering in the mud. She smelled death. She drew nearer.

Before her lay a little heap of bones.

Thin little bones, frail fragments.

The little skeleton lay on a mound of silt that had gathered against a stone. The bones were gnawed clean, the legs and ribs disarranged as if rats had been at them. A few hanks of pale fur clung to the shoulder blade. The skull was bare of flesh. The curved cranium, the huge eye sockets, the brief insert of the nose were readily identifiable. Within its mouth the tiny incisors and daggerlike canines were unmistakably feline.

She stretched closer, studying the small, nearly hidden object which lay beneath the cat's skull attached to its gaping collar.

The collar stood up like a hoop, circling the tiny vertebrae of the dead cat's frail neck, a collar that had once been blue but was now faded nearly to the color of mud. Attached to it was a small brass plate, the three words engraved on it were smeared over by mud. With a shaking paw, she wiped the mud away. She read the cat's name, and the name of its owner. Crouching over the skeleton, she studied the other object lying in the slime. As she leaned to look, her whiskers brushed across the cat's skull.

A wristwatch had been buckled securely around the cat's collar.

Even through the coating of mud she could see how heavy and ornate it was, could see a portion of the gold case flanked by two gold emblems like the wings of a soaring bird. She sniffed at it and backed away, stood looking at the pitiful remains of the white cat and at the last link in the puzzle of Janet Jeannot's death.

She shivered, but not with chill. She was hardly aware of the tunnel and the slime and the dog that still fought to crawl in, struggling to snatch her. All her attention, all her amazement, was fixed on the white cat. He had led her here, to the last clue.

And not only had the white cat sought to show her this final evidence; he had, in coming to her in dream, told her far more.

He had reached out to her from beyond a vast barrier. From somewhere beyond death he had spoken to her. When she dreamed of the white cat she had touched an incredible wonder, had sensed for a little while a small part of a dimension closed to ordinary vision. She had glimpsed what lay beyond death.

She was so engrossed she didn't realize the light in the tunnel had brightened. When she turned to look, the mouth of the culvert was empty. The dog had freed himself and had gone-or he was crouched outside licking blood from his face, waiting for her.

Feeling strong, almost invincible, she headed for the mouth of the tunnel.

Stepping from the pipe, she studied the bushes, the hills falling away below her. She reared up to look above.

The dog was gone.

She sat down just inside the mouth of the pipe, wondering. Strange that he would give up so easily. She cleaned herself up, sleeking her fur, thinking about the white cat. About Janet's death. And about the wristwatch-Kendrick Mahl's watch-that ostentatious piece of jewelry which matched exactly the watch in Mahl's newspaper picture.

How did the watch get fixed to the white cat's collar? Did Janet put it there, maybe just before she died?

The picture was taken only days before the opening; Mahl had the watch then. Did he lose it the morning of the fire? Was he waiting in the studio when Janet came upstairs? Did he let himself in as she prepared her work, laying out her welding equipment, filling the coffeemaker?

Or had he been there already, perhaps the day before, losing his watch then?

She licked the wounded tip of her tail, removing the congealing blood, smoothing the raw skin where hair had been pulled out-and puzzling over Mahl's watch. He would not deliberately have left it in Janet's studio; he had no business there.

Licking her tail, she found that none of her little vertebrae was broken. She was lucky, the way that dog grabbed her, that half her tail wasn't missing, like poor Joe's- though he seemed to get along fine with a docked tail, seemed as proud of that short appendage as if he were some kind of fancy retriever, an elegant feline bird dog.

For herself, she would be lost without her tail. She took great pride in that dark, mink-colored, silky, tabby-striped extremity. Before ever she could speak human language, she had talked with her tail as much as with her eyes and her twitching ears. Her repertoire of tail dances could convey a whole world of needs and emotions to a perceptive viewer. She'd detest some debilitating injury to that elegant appurtenance.

Well her dear tail was intact, her wound was only a scratch. It would heal, the hair would grow back.

Mahl killed her, she thought nervously. Janet's last act on this earth was to buckle Mahl's watch around Binky's collar and somehow chase him away, make him run away from the burning building.

She thought about the white cat's appearing to her in dreams long after he was dead, showing her things she could not know in any other way-extending to her a heady promise. The promise there would be something else, another life after her own small bones had shed their earthly flesh. Promise of Joy, as Wilma had read to her once, Joy, different from ordinary pleasure. The brightness of another kind of light… from within another dimension.

She rose, stepped out of the pipe to the fresh green grass, sat down in the thin wash of sun fingering down across the hills behind her. Wrapping her tail around herself, she sat looking down the falling hills and up to the mysterious sky, and a deep, pure happiness sang through her, pulsing and shaking her.

It was there that Joe found her, sitting happily in the sun rumbling with purrs.