Night Freight (25 page)

He knew that Henry James (whom he had read in college) once said about them: "Cats and monkeys, monkeys and cats—all human life is there."

He knew that they were predators with a streak of cruelty: they liked to toy with their prey before devouring it.

And he knew they were independent, selfish, aloof, patient, cunning, mischievous, extra clean, and purred when they were contented.

In short, his knowledge was limited, fragmentary, and mostly trivial. And none of it offered a clue to this cat's presence or behavior.

"The hell with it," he said. "This has gone far enough. Tom, you're trespassing. Out you go, right now."

He advanced on the cat, slowly so as not to frighten it. It let him get within two steps, then darted away again. Decker went after it—and went after it, and went after it. It avoided him effortlessly, gliding from one point in the room to another without once taking its yellow-bright gaze from him.

After several minutes, winded and vaguely frightened himself, he gave up the chase. "Damn you," he said, "what do you
want
here?"

The tom stared, switching its tail.

Decker's imagination began to soar again. All sorts of fantastic explanations occurred to him. Suppose the cat was Satan in disguise, come after his soul? Suppose, as in George Langelaan's story "The Fly," a scientist somewhere had been experimenting with a matter transporter and a cat had gotten inside with an evil human subject? Suppose the tom was a kind of modem-day Medusa: look at it long enough and it drives you mad? Suppose—

The cat jumped off the couch and started toward him.

Decker felt a sharp surge of fear. Rigid with it, he watched the animal come to within a few feet and then sit again and glare up at him. Incoming sunlight reflected in its yellow eyes created an illusion of depth and flame that was almost hypnotic.

Compulsively, Decker turned and ran out of the room and slammed the door behind him.

In the kitchen he picked up the telephone—and immediately put it down again. Who was he going to call? The county sheriff's office? "I've got a strange cat in my rented cabin and I can't get rid of it. Can you send somebody right out?" Good Christ, they'd laugh themselves sick.

Decker poured a glass of red wine and tried to get a grip on himself.
I'm not an ailurophobe
, he thought,
and I'm not paranoid or delusional, and I'm not—nice irony for you—a 'fraidy cat. Cats are just cats, damn it. So why am I letting this one upset me this way?

The wine calmed him, made him feel sheepish again. He went back into the living room.

The cat wasn't there.

He looked in the bedroom and the bathroom, the cabin's only other rooms. No cat. Gone, then. Grew tired of whatever game it had been playing, ran off through the balcony doors and back into the woods.

That made him feel even better—more relieved, he admitted to himself, than the situation warranted. He shut and locked the balcony doors, took the Fred Brown paperback to the couch, and tried to resume reading.

He couldn't concentrate. It was hot in the cabin with the doors and windows shut, and the cat was still on his mind. He decided to have another glass of wine. Maybe that would mellow him enough to restore his mental equilibrium, even get his creative juices flowing. He hadn't done as much work on his novel in the past two weeks as he'd planned.

He poured the wine, drank half of it in the kitchen. Took the rest into the bedroom, where he'd set up his Macintosh laptop.

The tomcat was sitting in the middle of the bed. Fear and disbelief made Decker drop the glass; wine like blood spatters glistened across the redwood flooring. "How the hell did you get in here?" he shouted.

Switch. Switch.

He lunged at the bed, but the cat leapt down easily and raced out of the room. Decker ran after it, saw it dart into the kitchen. He ran in there—and the cat had vanished again. He searched the room, couldn't find it. Back to the living room. No cat. Bedroom, bathroom. No cat.

Fine, dandy, except for one thing. All the doors and windows were still tightly shut. The tom couldn't have gotten out; it
had
to still be inside the cabin.

Shaken, Decker stood looking around, listening to the silence. How had the cat gotten back inside in the first place? Where was it hiding?

What did it want from him?

He tried to tell himself again that he was overreacting. But he didn't believe it. His terror was real and so was the lingering aura of menace the torn had brought with it.

I've got to find it, he thought grimly. Find it and get rid of it once and for all.

Bedroom. Nightstand drawer. His .32 revolver.

Decker had never shot anything with the gun, for sport or otherwise; he'd only brought it along for security, since his nearest neighbor was half a mile away and the nearest town was another four miles beyond there. But he knew he would shoot the cat when he found it, irrational act or not. Just as he would have shot a human intruder who threatened him.

Once more he searched the cabin, forcing himself to do it slowly and methodically. He looked under and behind the furniture, inside the closets, under the sink, through cartons—every conceivable hiding place.

There was no sign of the tom.

His mouth and throat were sand-dry; he had to drink three glasses of water to ease the parching. The thought occurred to him then that he hadn't found the cat because the cat didn't exist; that it was a figment of his hyperactive imagination induced by the Brown story. Hallucination, paranoid obsession . . . maybe he was paranoid and delusional after all.

"Crap," he said aloud. "The damned cat's real."

He turned from the sink—and the cat was sitting on the kitchen table, glowing yellow eyes fixed on him, tail switching.

Decker made an involuntary sound, threw up his arm, and tried to aim the .32, but the arm shook so badly that he had to brace the gun with his free hand. The cat kept on staring at him. Except for the rhythmic flicks of its tail, it was as still as death.

His finger tightened on the trigger.

Switch.

And sudden doubts assailed him. What if the cat had telekinetic powers, and when he fired, it turned the bullet back at him? What if the cat was some monstrous freak of nature, endowed with superpowers, and before he could fire it willed him out of existence?

Supercat
, he thought.
Jesus, I am going crazy!

He pulled the trigger.

Nothing happened; the gun didn't fire.

The cat jumped down off the table, came toward him—not as it had earlier, but as if with a purpose.

Frantically Decker squeezed the trigger again, and again, and still the revolver failed to fire. The tom continued its advance. Decker backed away in terror, came up against the wall, then hurled the weapon at the cat, straight at the cat. It should have struck the cat squarely in the head, only at the last second it seemed to
loop around
the tom's head like a sharp-breaking curveball—

Vertigo seized him. The room began to spin, slowly,
then rapidly, and there was a gray mist in front of his eyes. He felt himself starting to fall, shut his eyes, put out his hands to the wall in an effort to brace his body
—

—and the wall wasn't there—

—and he kept right on falling . . .

D
ecker opened his eyes. He was lying on a floor, only it was not the floor of his rented kitchen; it was the floor of a gray place, a place without furnishings or definition, a place where the gray mist floated and shimmied and everything—walls, floor, ceiling—was distorted, surreal.

A nonplace. A cat place?

Something made a noise nearby. A cat sound unlike any he had ever heard or could have imagined—a shrill mewling roar.

Decker jerked his head around. And the tom was there, the tom filled the nonplace as if it had grown to human size while he had been shrunk to feline dimensions. It loomed over him, its tail switching, its whiskers quivering. When he saw it like that he tried to stand and run . . . and it reached out one massive paw, almost lazily, and brought it down on his chest, pinned him to the floor. Its jaws opened wide, and he was looking up then into the wet cavern of its mouth, at the rows of sharp white spikes that gleamed there.

Cats are predators with a streak
of
cruelly: they like to toy with their prey before devouring it
.

"No!"

Big old tom like you, you need plenty of fuel.

Decker opened his mouth to scream again, but all that came out was a mouselike squeak.

And then it was feeding time. . . .

Don't be fooled by the touristy background descriptions in the following. What we have here is dark and deadly things lurking beneath an innocuous surface, like piranha in the seemingly placid waters of a lake. They're the sneaky sort, too, in that they may just continue to nibble for a while after you've had your taste of paradise. The tale's basic premise was given to me by a bookseller friend, who swears he met the real-life counterparts of the Archersons on a trip to England a few years ago. Art (if my fictional interpretation can be called that) imitates the seamier side of life, for a change.

J
an and I met the Archersons at the Hotel Kolekole in Kailua Kona, on the first evening of our Hawaiian vacation. We'd booked four days on the Big Island, five on Maui, four on Kauai, and three and a half at Waikiki Beach on Oahu. It would mean a lot of shunting around, packing and unpacking, but it was our first and probably last visit to Hawaii and we had decided to see as many of the islands as we could. We'd saved three years for this trip—a second honeymoon we'd been promising ourselves for a long time—and we were determined to get the absolute most out of it.

Our room was small and faced inland; it was all we could afford at a luxury hotel like the Kolekole. So in order to sit and look at the ocean, we had to go down to the rocky, black-sand beach or to a roofed but open-sided lanai bar that overlooked the beach. The lanai bar was where we met Larry and Brenda Archerson. They were at the next table when we sat down for drinks before dinner, and Brenda was sipping a pale green drink in a tall glass. Jan is naturally friendly and curious and she asked Brenda what the drink was—something called an Emerald Bay, a specialty of the hotel that contained rum and crème de menthe and half a dozen other ingredients—and before long the four of us were chatting back and forth. They were about our age, and easy to talk to, and when they invited us to join them we agreed without hesitation.

It was their first trip to Hawaii too, and the same sort of dream vacation as ours: "I've wanted to come here for thirty years," Brenda said, "ever since I first saw Elvis in
Blue Hawaii
." So we had that in common. But unlike us, they were traveling first-class. They'd spent a week in one of the most exclusive hotels on Maui, and had a suite here at the Kolekole, and would be staying in the islands for a total of five weeks. They were even going to spend a few days on Molokai, where Father Damien had founded his lepers' colony over a hundred years ago.

Larry told us all of this in an offhand, joking way—not at all flaunting the fact that they were obviously well-off. He was a tall, beefy fellow, losing his hair as I was and compensating for it with a thick brush moustache. Brenda was a big-boned blonde with pretty gray eyes. They both wore loud Hawaiian shirts and flower leis, and Brenda had a pale pink flower—a hibiscus blossom, she told Jan—in her hair. It was plain that they doted on each other and plain that they were having the time of their lives. They kept exchanging grins and winks, touching hands, kissing every now and then like newlyweds. It was infectious. We weren't with them ten minutes before Jan and I found ourselves holding hands too.

They were from Milwaukee, where they were about to open a luxury catering service. "Another lifelong dream," Brenda said. Which gave us something else in common, in an indirect way. Jan and I own a small restaurant in Coeur d'Alene, Carpenter's Steakhouse, which we'd built into a fairly successful business over the past twenty years. Our daughter Lynn was managing it for us while we were in Hawaii.

We talked with the Archersons about the pros and cons of the food business and had another round of drinks which Larry insisted on paying for. When the drinks arrived, he lifted his mai tai and said, "
Aloha nui kakou
, folks."

"That's an old Hawaiian toast" Brenda explained. "It means to your good health, or something like that. Larry is a magnet for Hawaiian words and phrases. I swear he'll be able to write a tourist phrasebook by the time we leave the islands."

"Maybe I will too,
kuu ipo
."

She wrinkled her nose at him, then leaned over and nipped his ear. "
Kuu ipo
means sweetheart," she said to us.

When we finished our second round of drinks, Larry asked, "You folks haven't had dinner yet, have you?"

We said we hadn't.