Cat People (20 page)

When the leopard hit it, it felt to Oliver as though a car going at full speed had slammed into the mattress. Amid the snarling and ripping sounds the cottony mattress stuffing exploded into the bedroom. It floated gently around the man and the cat, settling on the carpet like a soft snowfall.

The claws raked Oliver's chest, his stomach. He looked down in horror at the angry red furrows in his flesh.

A sudden thumping at the door.

"For God's sake, Alice, shoot it open!"

The muscles of the cat rippled under the glistening black coat. It was tensing for the final assault. Oliver seized a pitifully fragile chair and held it out. The cat splintered it with one contemptuous blow.

The talons ripped Oliver's shoulder and down his arm. His vision began to blur as the pain paralyzed him.

An explosion out in the hallway, and the door burst inward. For one frozen second the leopard and the wounded man stared at the woman standing in the doorway with the rifle to her shoulder. The cat turned and started toward her. Alice fired.

The leopard bounced into the air, spun around, and hit the floor awkwardly.

She fired again. The impact of the second bullet knocked the cat off its feet. It struggled to a sitting position and twisted its head back, trying to bite at the wound in its side. Then, with a baleful look at Alice, the animal dragged itself toward the window, and had its front paws on the sill when Alice fired the third time. This one blew the big cat out through the broken window. The heard the body land with a soggy thud on the rain-soaked ground below.

Alice dropped the rifle and pushed her way through the debris to where Oliver knelt in the corner of the room. Blood covered his face and soaked through the front of his shirt. He opened his eyes and gazed blankly at Alice for a moment. Then his face cleared.

"What took you so long?"

Impulsively Alice took him in her arms, paying no attention to the blood that stained her dress. They held each other for a moment, then stiffened as outside there rose a deep, wailing howl.

"That thing can't be alive," Alice said in a hoarse whisper. "I shot it three times. All solid hits."

The howling came again.

"Help me to the window," Oliver said.

Together they struggled to the broken window and stood there as the rain pelted in on them. Below, stretched out on the lawn, with its black face staring blindly into the rain, lay the leopard. Kneeling beside the dead cat, stroking its wet fur, was Irena. She raised her face to the night and howled.

In death the black leopard looked even larger than it had when it was alive. It lay on a white enameled table under fluorescent lights in the laboratory of the zoo administration building. Oliver Yates, bandaged and pale, stood beside Sergeant Brant, looking down at the dead animal.

"Big sonofabitch," said the detective.

"Mm-hmm." Oliver was thoughtful.

"Beats the hell out of me where he's been hiding. Or how he found his way to your house."

"Coincidence, maybe," Oliver suggested.

"Coincidence, my ass. That sucker came looking for you. Or for the Gallier girl. Somehow, against all the laws of nature, he found you."

"There is still a lot we don't understand about animal behavior," Oliver told him.

"And I, for one, would just as soon leave it that way." The policeman switched his attention from the dead leopard to Oliver. "He ripped you up pretty good. Are you sure you're going to be all right?"

"Luckily, none of the wounds went really deep," Oliver said. "I promised to go back to the hospital and get the dressings changed when I'm through here. But first I want to get an autopsy done on this beast. Care to hang around and watch?"

"No, thanks. It's bad enough that I'm forced to watch them do these on humans. Anyway, my case isn't closed. I still have to find Paul Gallier."

"Well, good luck, George."

"Same to you." With a last look at the dead cat, Brant left the building.

From a tray ofgleaming instruments, Oliver selected a heavy scalpel. He strained to roll the leopard's body so it lay belly up, then poised the scalpel for the first incision, starting right under the chin.

Gauging the depth of his cut so he would not damage any internal organs, Oliver slipped the blade into the dark flesh and sliced in a straight line down the length of the cat's belly. Satisfied that he had made a clean cut, he lay the scalpel aside and picked up a pair of forceps. He gripped the skin with the flat tips of the forceps and began to peel it back.

Immediately he recognized that there was more resistance than there should be. He lay the tongs aside and bent down for a closer look. There, just beneath the flap of hide he had peeled back, was a second layer of skin—pinkish, translucent ... and human.

Oliver straightened up fast. "Jesus Christ," he muttered.

He began to strip away more of the animal hide. The two layers of skin were connected by gristly threads. He had to use a long-bladed scalpel, held sideways, to separate them.

Sweating heavily as he worked, Oliver finally had a large portion of the leopard's skin laid back from the belly and clamped. There inside the cat, distorted still by the animal skeleton, was the unmistakable form of an evolving human being. The head, tucked forward on the chest, bore the face of Paul Gallier.

Fighting down an impulse to gag, Oliver stepped back from the table. He watched in disbelief as the half-formed man within the leopard shuddered. An arm flopped out of the opened cat's belly and smacked wetly on the metal table top. The distorted head raised on the neck and began to wobble from side to side.

"Oh, God, no!" Oliver said.
"No!"
He realized he was shouting in the empty room, and clapped his mouth shut.

The grotesque pale thing inside the cat continued to shudder and flop about. Oliver took up the long-bladed scalpel and forced himself to approach the table again. Clamping his right wrist with his left hand to steady it, he drove the stainless steel blade into the pale flesh of the oversized embryo.

There was a sudden hiss and a gurgling sound. Oliver jumped back as a foul smelling yellow-brown liquid spurted from the carcass, splashing over the dissecting table and spilling onto the floor. As the noxious liquid bubbled out, the body of the leopard, and what was inside it, shrank and sizzled and twisted on the table until only a fleshy coil remained in a pool of mucus.

Oliver gave himself five minutes to sit down and pull his nerves together. Then he set to work cleaning up the mess.

In the New Orleans City Jail Irena Gallier sat in a hard wooden chair and faced Femolly through a mesh of heavy-gauge steel wire.

"My brother is dead," Irena said.

"I know that," said the tall black woman.

"How can you know?"

"I feel it." A single tear rolled from each eye down the coffee-colored cheeks. "You must not think of your brother as a bad man. He did not choose to be what he was."

"What
was
he, Femolly? What am I? What makes us the way we are?"

Femolly glanced over at the door. A jail matron stood there with her arms folded, bored, paying no attention to the conversation.

"A long, long time ago in another land there waa a race of people who gave their children to the gods when they were angry. Those old gods were the giant cats. Little by little, over many lifetimes, the souls of the little children got all mixed up with the souls of the cats. One became the other. Both became one. Most of the race has vanished long ago, but a few live on today."

"And I ... I am one of those people?" Irena said.

"Your father and your mother were. And their father and mother. And your brother. What do you think?"

"Is there nothing I can do? No place I can go?"

"Accept your fate, child. There is no changing it, and there is no hiding from it. You must go and seek your own kind."

"But there is a man ..."

"Listen to Femolly. You can never be happy with people who are not like you. You can only bring destruction to them and to yourself. As your brother did."

"No!" Irena sprang to her feet, upsetting the chair.

The matron snapped out of her daydream and hurried over. "What's the trouble here?"

Irena ignored her. She said to Femolly, "I won't accept that. I can't live that way. It isn't fair. I want to love and laugh and find my happiness like other people. I have done nothing wrong."

Femolly spoke calmly. "What you are is not your fault, child, any more than the color of my face is mine. But you'd best accept it."

"Never!" Irena cried.

The matron stepped in and tried to quiet her, but Irena spun away and ran out of the room. When she was out of the building and into the sunlight she stood on the sidewalk breathing hard.

She had a
right
to be happy. Femolly had to be mistaken. Irena resolved that she would have her happiness. Nothing and nobody was going to stand in her way.

Alice Moore pounded rhythmically along the asphalt jogging path that circled the park. She concentrated hard on the coordination of her arm and leg movements, her breathing, the rate of her heartbeat. She thought about how the asphalt felt under the soles of her Nike joggers, the shrill chirping of the birds, the look of the sky through the elm branches overhead, the sharp smell of fresh-cut grass. She focused her mind on anything except her relationship with Oliver Yates, and how it had started to come apart the day Irena Gallier walked into their lives.

Alice licked at her upper lip and tasted the salt of her perspiration. Good. If she got nicely tired, maybe she could sleep tonight without the tormenting visions of Oliver and Irena together.

She rounded the corner and the setting sun threw a long gangly shadow of a running woman on the path ahead of her. Alice frowned. The setting sun meant it would be getting dark soon. Not a good time for a woman to be out jogging alone. Not even through a well-kept park in an upper-middle-class neighborhood like this one. Rather than make the complete circuit of the jogging trail, she decided to cut across the park to St. Charles Avenue and catch the streetcar there for home.

She turned off the asphalt onto a narrower path of hard-packed dirt. The regular slap-slap of her shoes changed to a softer thud.

She had gone only a short distance when a chill seized her. Something had changed. What was it? Alice concentrated on her surroundings. The birds. Where were the birds? Their noisy chirping had been cut off as though by a knife. The only sound now on the darkening path through the park was the cushioned impact of her Nikes.

Alice jogged on, puzzled and worried. Had her presence on the path frightened the birds into silence? No, they had been chattering busily away just seconds before. What could it mean?

Before she could come up with an answer, there was an explosion of sound above her head. She looked up to see hundreds of birds flap into the air and wheel off and away.

Strange. Alice's feeling of something being wrong grew stronger. She tried to concentrate on maintaining the rate and rhythm of her jog, but small fears pulled at the corners of her awareness.

Something rustled up ahead where the brush was thick and filled with shadows. A low overhanging branch moved, shaking suddenly for no visible reason.

Leopard!
The thought hit her like a fist in the stomach.

No, she reminded herself angrily. The leopard was dead. She had personally killed it. Oliver had cut it open this morning on a dissecting table at the zoo. It must have been an unsettling experience, because he flatly refused to talk about it.

The branch quivered again.

The wind. No, there was no wind. With a sudden increase in her pulse rate, Alice ran on.

The cat flew out of the tree black as death and screeching like a banshee. Alice stumbled and almost fell. She opened her mouth to scream, then held it in. The little black house cat, tail fluffed in alarm, landed on the path in front of her and scampered off through the brush.

Boy, have I got a case of nerves, Alice thought. She laughed in relief. The presence of the little cat would account for the strange behavior of the birds too. She picked up the pace again and jogged on.

The sun was almost down. Only the tops of the elm trees caught its fading light. Along the path where Alice jogged, the shadows merged into a pervading gloom. Her relief at seeing the little cat drained away, and the anxiety came back. The feeling of being watched. Of something following her.

She stopped at a water fountain, drank a little, gargled, and spat the water out on the ground. She wet her fingers and flicked droplets on her face and neck.

What was that?

A twig snapped. Something was moving in the brush.

Shape up, girl, Alice told herself. It was probably the little kitty cat still hanging around. She had to get her nerves in shape.

But it was dark now. The lights along the path were dim and spaced far apart. Time to get the hell out and get home.

Alice started along the path again, holding an easy pace to prove to herself that she was not panicky. Just jog along nice and steady, think about your body, and before you know it you'll be out of the woods and onto friendly, familiar St. Charles Avenue.

But damn it, there
was
something behind her. She could distinctly hear padded footfalls other than her own. Running. And not two feet, but four.

Without consciously willing it, Alice speeded up. The running feet behind her speeded up too. Whatever was back there was gaining.

Alice was on the verge of breaking into an uncontrolled run. Through her mind raced bloody pictures of slashing teeth and ripping claws. She saw again the torn-apart body of the woman in the hotel room. Her breath was coming in ragged gasps. Perspiration soaked her jogging suit.

"How many miles?"

Alice almost fell at the sound of the male voice close behind her. She forced herself back into a coordinated pace as two men wearing shorts and sweat shirts jogged up beside her. White, middle-aged, friendly looking. Obviously not muggers or rapists. And definitely not a black leopard.