Felidae on the Road - Special U.S. Edition (10 page)

Saffron, Niger and I had soon dropped back to the rear of the column, a place the boss obviously found congenial; it meant he could start on his story in peace. By now I'd spent so much time in the dark that my optical sensitivity to light was at its highest, and I could make out the winding ways of the sewers more clearly. For instance, I was surprised to see, in the distance, a fork where three streams met and flowed into the tunnel where we now were. Three identical tunnels led from this fork to goodness knows where, and in their turn must branch off into several other winding tunnels, making the underground maze complete. I was beginning to realise that my original plan of getting out of this labyrinth under my own steam had been an illusion, and I'd never see the light of day again without the aid of my blind friends.

'I expect you're wondering why we're blind, Francis,' said Saffron reflectively as we trotted after the rest of the enthusiastic procession. Niger, pacing along at my left, was listening attentively, her head bent, although she must have known the story already. 'The answer's simple: we live permanently in the dark, so in the course of time our visual nerves atrophy and become useless. You might not think it, but we're happy to make that sacrifice if it spares us having to live with human beings. We've all enjoyed human hospitality in the past, you see. Even I did. My owner was a well-known painter, regarded as a tremendous aesthete in artistic circles. My twin brother and I were a finishing touch for the sinister décor of his flat - a kind of live eye-catching device. This artist went in for kinky leather and sado-masochistic sex, and he admired a slim figure. The mere sight of someone well-nourished made him feel quite ill. He sometimes starved us for days on end so that we'd live up to his physical ideal too. When he went away for a long weekend he usually left us locked in the flat, and on one of these weekends my brother died of thirst because our owner hadn't even left us a bowl of water. Another time he went on holiday to Egypt in search of inspiration, but the only inspiration he brought back came from the goddess Bast, whose statue wears earrings. He thought this was a brilliant idea, and pierced my own ears for rings the very next day. After that I could never scratch behind my ears again without catching my claws in the rings and making my ears bleed. I was a great hit at his parties, all the same. Then things got rather nasty: the artist suffered a creative block - or rather, to put it bluntly, he went off his head. To stimulate his imagination he started torturing me and observing my reactions. He enjoyed it. He always wore his leather outfit and mask for these sessions, using a fondue fork heated on the stove for his experiments. After one such orgy my wounds burned with such intolerable pain that I ran all over the flat howling, frantically looking for something to cool me down. In my desperation I finally jumped into the lavatory bowl, plunging my whole body head first in the water. It soothed my wounds and my other injuries, but next moment I realised I was stuck in the S-bend. I couldn't go on, and I couldn't go back - now what? But then I saw for the first time the advantages of the anorexia he'd forced on me. I felt sure I could squeeze on down that squalid outlet if I helped myself with my forepaws and didn't panic. Eventually, half drowned, I reached the main drain, and when someone up above flushed the cistern, the rush of water washed me right into the sewage system. Down here I soon found companions in misfortune who'd suffered a similar fate. I haven't been back to the world above since then.'

He'd put a bit of weight on since then too, I silently added. But I didn't feel at all like laughing. I'd always known what kind of things went on in the world beyond the safety of Gustav's four walls. I was only too well aware that humans published meticulous records of dreadful things done to my own kind in their media, and though they might shed crocodile tears about it over a good meal and a glass of expensive wine it was only symbolic, like turning a prayer mill. They kept quiet about the everyday torments inflicted on animals because no one was really interested. By now the awe-inspiring word 'creature' had become a term of abuse.

Meanwhile the procession had reached the place where the tunnels divided, and the blind animals were jumping the sewers in pairs, with artistic ease. As this astonishingly precise manoeuvre was performed at high speed and they jumped one after the other in rapid succession, it looked from a distance as if bridges were rippling up and down over the three streams, bridges whose colour was constantly changing. At the end of our path, a corner where two of the streams met at an acute angle, Saffron and Niger catapulted themselves upwards too, flew through the air with limbs outstretched, like bats, and landed on the other side with the elegance of griffins. Now that my turn had come, my admiration was tempered with sheer fright, because I suddenly realised that the distance across the sewer to the path on the opposite bank, which also started at an angle, was at least two and a half metres. It was very dark here too, which made calculating even the simplest jump more difficult. At the same time, however, I felt ashamed to be bringing up the rear, and after a moment's hesitation I finally imitated the others. As a result, I was literally left dangling: my forepaws came down on the other side according to plan, but my back paws hit the void. Flailing frantically, I tried to correct my error, and for a split second, as my claws touched the side of the walkway, I thought my awkward acrobatics would do the trick. However, they were sabotaged by the slime deposited on the stone. I slipped and fell in the sludgy water. Fortunately there was a kind of swimming-pool ladder close to the place where I'd had fallen in, so I was able to haul myself up by it, like a monster emerging from the lagoon. I thanked my stars no one could see me doing this slapstick act, because otherwise more than one revision to the legend of Teenage Mutant Ninja Francis would have been called for.

When we set off again, padding after the pack along another nameless stone walkway, I fancied for a moment that even Saffron was wrinkling his nose. I shook myself as if a thousand fleas were attacking me, because the unique smell of the water in my fur after my bath caused deep offence to my already pretty paranoid obsession with cleanliness. I kept stopping, licking my coat frantically and combing my fur with my teeth to remove small lumps. The thought of the unspeakable substances I was swallowing in the process made my stomach churn. While I was trying to get perfectly clean and keep up with the others at the same time, Niger took up the story.

'We represent the conscience of our species, Francis,' she said belligerently. 'Even more: we grant final asylum, the last refuge from torture and death. For we are the Company of the Merciful. You see, Francis, the inequality that divides human beings into children of fortune and poor unlucky sods doesn't stop at them; it affects animals too. Though it's worth wondering whether the thoroughbred Arab in the royal stud who's had a dozen operations on his legs since falling in the Derby is really any better off than a forest squirrel facing hunger daily. Alas, we're all equal in suffering. You've seen nothing but the chocolate-covered side of life so far, Francis. But not many of us lie about on velvet cushions dozing ourselves blotto in sunny conservatories. Not many of us can afford to philosophise about the ideal ingredients of tinned food. You may think Saffron's escape down the S-bend sounds particularly tricky, but humans themselves sometimes use that way of getting rid of pets when they're not wanted any more, or there are too many of them. Drowning a whole litter in the bath is something that practical, inventive humans find rather unpleasant today, so they may just dispose of the little ones down the loo - painlessly, they think. After a nightmare journey through the drainage system, the babies reach us and we give them another chance of life - those who haven't drowned already. Or sometimes humans breed us into weird-looking specimens prized only for their extravagant deformities, like our unfortunate relatives of the hairless Sphynx breed, and individuals who don't fit the breeding programme get thrown into the dustbin half dead. Some of these victims, though badly injured, just manage to escape from their stinking coffins with the last of their strength, and then they find their way down to us through the gratings over gutters in the street. Living in the dark all the time has made us infertile, and we can't have children of our own. So instead we take great care of the children we've adopted and of our older brothers and sisters from the vivisection laboratories. They can spend the evening of their days peacefully here in the catacombs. The greatest risk we run is discovery by the sewage workers. They'd report their amazing find to the powers that be at once, and the powers that be would feel obliged to carry out a rigorous cleansing operation. We eat rats; luckily humans haven't found any foolproof way of exterminating rats yet. Hunting them is quite dangerous and sometimes leads to bloodshed, because they've grown abnormally large and heavy in the Promised Land of the sewers. But all things considered we can feel quite pleased with the success of our mission - or we could if sinister shadows from the past hadn't surfaced a little while back ...'

'Shadows from the past?' I said, surprised. This whole story had sounded like the last word in horror: could there be worse to come?

'That's what you could call them,' Saffron growled, taking up the tale. The column of greyish backs and expectantly raised tails winding on ahead of us curved round to the right.

'There was only one shadow really. But of course the past is interesting mainly as it affects the present. I believe you encountered something strange soon after entering our territory, Francis.'

'One corpse, drowned. Probably European Shorthair. Head severed from neck and no longer present. Numerous very large bite-marks on the body. Had probably been in the water for several days, hence the extremely bloated appearance of the body. Is to be assumed that the killing was not preceded by a fight of the sort usual among us with its rituals of challenge and defence; killer did not employ the customary neck-bite. Conclusion: victim must have been in a state of shock at the time, rendering him unable to defend himself and making things easy for the murderer. The extent of the brutality can hardly be explained any other way.'

I thought, with some pride, that no expert in forensic medicine could have put the salient points better. Saffron and Niger seemed impressed by my lightning analysis too, and momentarily slowed down. However, the big boss wasn't going to show his respect for my little grey cells openly. He wouldn't want anyone encroaching on his own authority. So he just looked impassive.

'We guessed it was something like that,' he said gruffly, following up his remark with a mock yawn. 'However, you weren't to know that this was the fifteenth or twentieth corpse to have paid us a visit to date.'

Dread descended on me like black folds of mourning tulle. I thought I was going to stumble, because the horror of it temporarily made me lose my balance. Good God, what monster was working at this frenzied rate to prove his skill in butchery? What could the motive be? Sheer love of violence? Hunger? Madness?

'The twentieth corpse?' I murmured incredulously. Something inside me refused to believe the inconceivable.

'Or maybe the thirtieth. We stopped counting the mutilated bodies after a while.' Saffron was gradually forgetting to play the authority game; he sounded genuinely upset. His expression and the thoughtful way he walked showed that these incidents got right under his fur. In fact he was very worried indeed.

'Because of our living conditions here, we can't help swimming in the sewers now and then. I know humans think we avoid ordinary water the way the devil avoids the holy variety, but that's not true of all of us - much of it's based on superstition, and practice can make anyone a good swimmer. Anyway, recently we've found that when we go into the water we're more and more likely to find one of these mutilated corpses floating into our paws. We believe the murders are committed somewhere in the forest outside the city, because we quite often find pine needles stuck in the victims' wounds. There are some streams and ditches there which run straight into the sewage system. And the nearby farms have drainage feeding into the system too. So it's possible the murder victims were brothers and sisters of ours living with farmers in the country.'

'And you want me to go out into the world and discover who dunnit?' I said, without much enthusiasm.

'Oh no, you don't need to do anything like that, my dear Francis. We know who dunnit.'

'You know who ...
but then for heaven's sake why don't you get your skates on and pick him up?'

I stopped abruptly. I wished I hadn't made that last remark. Sometimes, I realised, I had all the sensitivity of a slogger in a baseball game.

'Your eyes,' I said, awkwardly. 'I suppose they make things difficult for you outside.'

'Yes, there's a bit of a problem there,' said Saffron, to my relief ignoring the brick I'd dropped. 'But the complicated part is finding him, because he's everywhere and nowhere. In fact strictly speaking he doesn't exist: he's a legend, a shadow from the past ...'

Saffron suddenly stopped and sat there, concentrating hard. The sparkling gold rings swung gently from his pointed ears, pricked in their most receptive position; his head swayed back and forth like a tank turret seeking its target, and his whiskers quivered busily, as if they were insect antennae processing information. Then his blind, flickering gaze came to rest on a certain point in the waters of the sewer.

'Niger, you tell him about the Black Knight,' whispered the Chartreux, barely audibly, and with a mighty leap he plunged head first into the water. While I was still trying to recover from my surprise, he came to the surface again with something struggling frantically between his teeth. He had obviously caught a rat and was taming it for breakfast. I'd already heard amazing tales of the acoustic sensitivity of the blind, but this episode surely took the biscuit.