Felidae on the Road - Special U.S. Edition (27 page)

'Yes, now I remember seeing an animal like that somewhere else. It was grazing near a human house in the middle of the forest. There were lots of the same kind. You could call it a herd. But only one of them was black.'

That had been the last thing Zack said about the Black Knight's means of transport - before Ambrosius sank his teeth into our most forthcoming witness. His hunting urges had risen in proportion to the shrew's willingness to spit out ever more explosive information. Zack had mentioned another important detail too: 'There was something odd about the alleged monster's coat, though. It shone as if it had a very high fat content, or was just wet.'

Suddenly a murky curtain parted before my mind's eye and opened up a view of a bright, clear landscape. I saw before me the answer to the riddle, shining like a symmetrical and perfectly shaped
objet d'art
. Now the whole thing made sense. All the awkwardly shaped bits of the jigsaw suddenly fitted smoothly together into a coherent chain of evidence. How could I have been so na
ï
ve - and so illogical?

The Black Knight was none other than my brilliant friend Ambrosius. Why? For a number of reasons - for every reason, beginning with the simple fact that only a hoaxer of outstanding intellectual capacities could devise the crazy idea of cashing in on the mystical aura surrounding the Black Knight and making a manipulative illusion of it. A hoaxer of genius like Ambrosius. The legendary figure had first appeared to me on top of a cliff. This cliff happened to be near Diana's house, so the person acting the Knight had time to get back and remove his 'costume' at his leisure. Then I'd seen the paddock with the sheep outside the house, looking like a woodland idyll. The shaggy black sheep had made Ambrosius an ideal mastiff substitute; furthermore, it was a gentle animal and easily led. The spurious Knight had mounted it when he set off on his magical mystery tour. It wasn't so easy to tell different species apart at night, particularly if they were about the same size.

But what about the Black Knight's costume? For Ambrosius's own fur was of a silvery apricot colour. The explanation was to do with liquid, two kinds of it. For instance, the water of the stream I'd heard running by, quite close, when I went over to the cottage. But the water had been only a make-up remover.

'Please do-do-don't kill me, brother! It was only a jo-jo-joke!' Ambrosius had begged me when I caught him writing last night. And he had been very surprised to find that I wasn't threatening him with punishment. Punishment? Punishment for what? I'd assumed he was so jittery because he'd misinterpreted my character; I thought he'd initially mistaken me for some uncouth member of our species gone off the rails as a result of unnatural behaviour. You do find such fundamentalists among us. Well, look at the Wild Ones. Yet the sight of him should have made me stop and think. His fur was still wet, and there was a little puddle round the place where he was sitting. No doubt about it, he'd been drenched through very shortly before. Mere imagination? Certainly not, because what were his first words after we nearly drowned in the stream this morning?

'B-b-bloody hell! The second ti-ti-time today I've had to take a bath in this damn brook!'

The
second
time. So he must have taken the first bath just before I met him. His panic on our first meeting was therefore connected with the false assumption that I'd seen through his pretence of being the Black Knight and followed him back to the house in the forest. But just how did the Black Knight get to be so very black? The answer was ink, black ink, the stuff that sometimes seemed to have a positively erotic attraction for Ambrosius. He always dyed himself with it when he was going out to stage a performance of the fine art of laying a false trail. Next a leisurely trot on the black sheep through the forest, with watchful eyes featuring as an appreciative audience, and there you had your legend. Later on, when he'd delighted his audience sufficiently in the part of mysterious forest spirit, he washed in the stream and was restored to his true identity. Brilliant was the word for it.

What about all the witnesses and their evidence, though? What about the owl, for instance? He'd seen the Black Knight more or less
in
flagrante
near the farms. But could I believe that evidence? Ambrosius had also acted as interpreter of what the animals said. He could have mistranslated on purpose, or perhaps he didn't really know the language of the other forest creatures at all. Look at it closely, and our whole investigation came under the heading of disinformation.

However, there was one small thing to spoil my pleasure in finding the solution to the whole case: Ambrosius was not the murderer. I didn't believe someone of his aesthetic nature would commit such dreadful cruelties, and I didn't think a single person could carry out such large-scale butchery on his own. No, Ambrosius was only a tool in the pay of dark powers; you could call him an idealist, faking things to cover up for the murderers at all costs. But why? Why would such an intelligent and likeable character choose to take the side of evil?

Suddenly I had a great idea. I knew who could answer these questions: Ambrosius himself. I must seek him out, get him to tell me why he'd abandoned his ideas about the harmonious coexistence of all animals and the life-affirming aspect of nature, and made a pact with a bunch of evil murderers. For I might not know everything yet, but I knew one thing for certain: at the bottom of his heart, Ambrosius was a good creature.

All of a sudden the whole cave seemed to me a stifling prison cell, and even the fascinating cave paintings suddenly lost their attraction. Without thinking what consequences a visit to Ambrosius would have for me personally, I hurried out through the mouth of the cave. While I was in there the Fossilised Forest had added some further apocalyptic effects to its end-of-the-world outfit. An impressive torrent was pouring down on the wasteland of dead wood, a torrent which easily outdid its predecessors. The rain was pouring down so hard that you could get only a vague idea of the dead landscape, rather as if you were standing directly under a waterfall. Complicated flashes of forked lightning shot across the battlefield painting which was the dark and clouded sky, and bathed every tiny nook and cranny in glaring, flickering light. Thunder rolled continually as accompaniment to the visual horrors, like artillery fire at close range.

Within seconds I was sopping wet, a condition which by now I could have described to any industrial tribunal as an occupational disease. I careered like one possessed towards the healthy part of the forest. Every raindrop that hit my fur was like the sharp point of an arrow, and every time I stumbled over branches I felt a cane was whipping against my sensitive paws. But this time something was different, different from the wild chases of not so long before. Something odd was at work inside me, although I couldn't be more specific about it than that. Ambrosius had described the phenomenon as 'psi-trailing', unconscious travel towards a goal in a way that our traditional sense of direction cannot explain. I'd doubted this, dismissing it as esoteric humbug. Now I was discovering for myself how the wish could become the will, and the will in turn could take over all physical control. The process was automatic. Without any urging on their owner's part, my paws turned a way I hadn't consciously chosen, galloping on at a suicidal pace. They were obviously staging some kind of revolt. Yet my rational faculty was not switched off. In my mind's eye I saw the house where I was going through the pouring rain and the tangled plants, looking like a fuzzy projection on a screen. Mysterious shadows were scuttling around the house, whisking into it, climbing up to the roof and leaping in through the window as if this was a planned attack. I couldn't identify the figures any more closely, because the picture flickered violently, as if it had a film of oil over it. But there were some things in it which remained clear and steady, not to say illuminating: eyes. Pairs of eyes, apparently like the eyes of my own kind, glowing like white-hot metal as they darted about or stopped to observe their surroundings closely.

What did this vision remind me of? I'd seen something similar, and not long before. Now I remembered. The daub Diana was working on showed almost the same subject. Luxuriant vegetation with feline eyes staring out of it at the observer. It couldn't be chance. There must be some connection between the painting and the sinister events now occurring in the house in the forest. As if inspired, I remembered the labels on all the empty file binders in the hut next to the cage for acclimatizing animals before reintroducing them to the wild: PROJECT ARK. The same name was on the satellite dish outside the house.

'...
Using expensive fi-fi-filter techniques, the Ark was sending back pictures of wooded areas in various phases of si-si-sickness, shaded in different colours,' Ambrosius had explained, adding that these pictures were kept on the video cassettes in Diana's studio. Of course I didn't know much about the technical side of it, but I suddenly felt there was something inconsistent in what had sounded a very plausible explanation. Did you really keep satellite pictures on video? Wouldn't you be more likely to make photographic prints of such pictures, so that if you wanted a quick look at them you didn't have to run the whole tape? But if the cassettes did not in fact contain records of the phases of environmental harm in the forest, then what did they hold? And how did the Ark satellite fit into this entire mishmash of lies? One way or another I must hurry, because something dreadful was going on in that house.

When at long last I reached Diana's house, after racing through the healthy part of the forest in a frenzied daze, the scene there didn't chime with the vision hovering before me during my psi-trailing. I couldn't see any dubious shadows flitting about or any pairs of eyes fixed penetratingly on me. The house lay in complete darkness, including the window on the first floor through which I'd seen Ambrosius producing his literary effusions a day before. The lightning, still flashing furiously, changed the night to a flickering photographic negative and sporadically lit the place up with a spotlight. The satellite dish pointed to the sky like something devised by Dr Frankenstein to attract electricity. The one thing that made this weird scene look at all familiar was the paddock with the sheep. Alarmed by the elemental forces, wet through, the animals were pressing anxiously together for warmth and comfort. How heartless of Diana to leave the poor things out in the open in such dreadful weather. Sheep can catch pneumonia too. Then I thought of another explanation: she might not be at home. Was she out on one of those long walks in the forest Ambrosius had mentioned to me in passing? And did she stick to such an iron routine that even an apocalyptic storm wouldn't deter her?

Look at it another way, however, and the absence of the mistress of the house was much to my advantage. It meant I could make a thorough investigation of the living quarters on the ground floor, something I'd been unable to do on my first visit. Then, and only then, I'd have a serious talk to Ambrosius. I sprinted out of the woods and ran to the veranda. As I reached it I felt something was wrong. There was some detail or other missing. Didn't I have to take another route last night to get to this veranda at all? Yes, of course, I'd had to devise a complicated way of slinking round the back of the house so that the monitors on the roof wouldn't set off the alarm. But this time nothing at all had happened, although the electronic spies ought to have registered me long before this. They'd obviously been switched off. Which was odd. Very odd.

The window to the studio containing the huge painting on its easel and the shelves laden with video cassettes was open just a little way. One weary leap, and I was inside. As even the weak old reading lamp wasn't on today, the first thing I had to do was accustom myself to the poor light. However, those demonically glaring eyes stared out of the forest in the picture as penetratingly as if the untalented artist had actually managed to breathe life if not beauty into them. And just as in my latest vision, they seemed to be guarding a satanic mystery, fanatically determined to do away with anyone who dared disclose it. I felt fear of those eyes, and unspeakable hatred at the same time, because I guessed instinctively that they were eye-slits in the masks of murderers.

I turned away from the painting and went through a narrow door into the dark corridor. On my right paw, a room which at first glance looked uninteresting enticed me in. I entered it, and unexpectedly discovered that I'd already found what I was vaguely looking for. The four walls were lined with metal work-surfaces fitted with little monitors permanently installed, regulators, buttons and light diodes, several computers, and other electronic apparatus which it was hard for a lay mind to identify precisely. Everything indicated that the pictorial information conveyed by the Ark from space was assessed in this mini-control room. I jumped up on the work-surface, and sure enough I found a spilt stack of large photographs showing sections of landscape from bird's eye view. There were several enlargements among them. It was fascinating to see how accurately a satellite could show even tiny things on earth in sharp outline.

A bright flash of lightning fell in through the window on the left, lending the photographs a clarity which brought some unsettling details into view. Could what I saw be true? Or was I now suffering from some kind of occupational sickness which made a detective see what he wanted to see? Good heavens, the satellite hadn't really been looking for environmental damage to the forest at all, as Ambrosius had claimed. That wasn't what any of the pictures showed. At first glance, they were just any old shots of field and woodland scenes. But wasn't that an animal with a bushy tail on the branch of a withered tree? And weren't there several more of them swimming in a stream? Trembling with excitement, I burrowed further into the pile until a photograph that positively bowled me over fell into my paws. It was an enlargement of the farm in the valley that I'd visited yesterday, only to leave in panic after finding all those corpses. But the photograph showed even more. A whole procession was coming down the hill towards the farmyard itself, and it was easy to guess why it was going there in the absence of any human occupants. That snapshot showed the murderers on their way to carry out a massacre among our domesticated kind in the next few minutes. The lower edge of the picture bore yesterday's date and the time: 12.27. Round about then I'd still have been in the sewers, eating that rat with Saffron and Niger. Which meant that the blind cats were finally ruled out as suspects.