8
I pushed through the prairie grass into the drainage swale and continued in the direction that I had been headed before the searchlights had drawn me uphill. After only a few steps, I halted, startled by something with radiant green eyes that waited on the trail in front of me.
Coyote.
Wolflike but smaller, with a narrower muzzle than that of a wolf, these rangy creatures could nonetheless be dangerous. As civilization encroached on them, they were quite literally murder on family pets even in the supposedly safe backyards of residential neighborhoods near the open hills. In fact, from time to time you heard of a coyote savaging and dragging off a child if the prey was young and small enough. Although they attacked adult humans only rarely, I wouldn’t care to rely on their restraint or on my superior size if I was to encounter a pack—or even a pair—of them on their home ground.
My night vision was still recovering from the dazzle of the searchlights, and a tense moment passed before I perceived that these hot green eyes were too closely set to be those of a coyote. Furthermore, unless this beast was in a full pounce posture with its chest pressed to the ground, its baleful stare was directed at me from too low a position to be that of a coyote.
As my vision readjusted to nightshade and moonlight, I saw that nothing more threatening than a cat stood before me. Not a cougar, which would have been far worse than a coyote and reason for genuine terror, but a mere house cat: pale gray or light beige, impossible to tell which in this gloom.
Most cats are not stupid. Even in the obsessive pursuit of field mice or little desert lizards, they will not venture deeply into coyote country.
Indeed, as I got a clearer view of it, the particular creature before me seemed more than usually quick and alert. It sat erect, head cocked quizzically, ears pricked, studying me intensely.
As I took a step toward it, the cat rose onto all fours. When I advanced another step, the cat spun away from me and dashed along the moon-silvered path, vanishing into the darkness.
Elsewhere in the night, the Hummer was on the move again. Its shriek and snarl rapidly grew louder.
I picked up my pace.
By the time I had gone a hundred yards, the Hummer was no longer roaring but idling somewhere nearby, its engine noise like a slow deep panting. Overhead, the predatory gaze of the lights swept the night for prey.
Upon reaching the next branching of the hollow, I discovered the cat waiting for me. It sat at the point of division, committed to neither trail.
When I moved toward the left-hand path, the cat scurried to the right. It halted after several steps—and turned its lantern eyes on me.
The cat must have been acutely aware of the searchers all around us, not just of the noisy Hummer but of the men on foot. With its sharp senses, it might even perceive pheromones of aggression streaming from them, violence pending. It would want to avoid these people as much as I did. Given the chance, I would be better off choosing an escape route according to the animal’s instincts rather than according to my own.
The idling engine of the Hummer suddenly thundered. The hard peals echoed back and forth through the hollows, so that the vehicle seemed to be simultaneously approaching and racing away. With this storm of sound, indecision flooded me, and for a moment I floundered in it.
Then I decided to go the way of the cat.
As I turned from the left-hand trail, the Hummer roared over the hilltop on the eastern flank of the hollow into which I had almost proceeded. For an instant it hung, suspended, as though weightless in a clock-stopped gap in time, headlights like twin wires leading a circus tightrope walker into midair, one searchlight stabbing straight up at the black tent of the sky. Time snapped across that empty synapse and flowed again: The Hummer tipped forward, and the front wheels crashed onto the hillside, and the rear wheels crossed the crest, and gouts of earth and grass spewed out from under its tires as it charged downhill.
A man whooped with delight, and another laughed. They were reveling in the hunt.
As the big wagon descended only fifty yards ahead of me, the hand-held searchlight swept the hollow.
I threw myself to the ground and rolled for cover. The rocky swale was hell on bones, and I felt my sunglasses crack apart in my shirt pocket.
As I scrambled to my feet, a beam as bright as an oak-cleaving thunderbolt sizzled across the ground on which I had been standing. Wincing at the glare, squinting, I saw the searchlight quiver and then sweep away to the south. The Hummer was not coming up the hollow toward me.
I might have stayed where I was, at the intersection of the trails, with the narrower point of the hill at my back, until the Hummer moved out of the vicinity, rather than risk encountering it in the next hollow. When four flashlights winked far back on the trail that I had followed to this point, however, I ceased to have the luxury of hesitation. I was beyond the reach of these men’s lights, but they were approaching at a trot, and I was in imminent danger of discovery.
When I rounded the point of the hill and entered the hollow to the west of it, the cat was still there, as though waiting for me. Presenting its tail to me, it scampered away, though not so fast that I lost sight of it.
I was grateful for the stone under me, in which I could not leave betraying footprints—and then I realized that only fragments of my broken sunglasses remained in my shirt pocket. As I ran, I fingered my pocket and felt one bent stem and a jagged piece of one lens. The rest must have scattered on the ground where I had fallen, at the fork in the trail.
The four searchers were sure to spot the broken frames. They would divide their forces, two men to each hollow, and they would come after me harder and faster than ever, energized by this evidence that they were closing on their quarry.
On the far side of this hill, out of the vale where I had barely escaped the searchlight, the Hummer began to climb again. The shriek of its engine rose in pitch, swelled in volume.
If the driver paused on this grassy hilltop to survey the night once more, I would run undetected beneath him and away. If instead he raced across the hill and into this new hollow, I might be caught in his headlights or pinned by a searchlight beam.
The cat ran, and I ran.
As it sloped down between dark hills, the hollow grew wider than any that I had traveled previously, and the rocky swale in the center widened, too. Along the verge of the stone path, the tall cordgrass and the other brush bristled thicker than elsewhere, evidently watered by a greater volume of storm runoff, but the vegetation was too far to either side to cast even a faint dappling of moonshadows over me, and I felt dangerously exposed. Furthermore, this broad declivity, unlike those before it, ran as straight as a city street, with no bends to shield me from those who might enter it in my wake.
On the highlands, the Hummer seemed to have come to a halt once more. Its grumble drained away in the sluicing breeze, and the only engine sounds were mine: the rasp and wheeze of breathing, heartbeat like a pounding piston.
The cat was potentially fleeter than I—wind on four feet; it could have vanished in seconds. For a couple of minutes, however, it paced me, staying a constant fifteen feet ahead, pale gray or pale beige, a mere ghost of a cat in the moonglow, occasionally glancing back with eyes as eerie as séance candles.
Just when I began to think that this creature was purposefully leading me out of harm’s way, just as I began to indulge in one of those orgies of anthropomorphizing that make Bobby Halloway’s brain itch, the cat sped away from me. If that dry rocky wash had been filled with a storm gush, the tumbling water could not have outrun this feline, and in two seconds, three at most, it disappeared into the night ahead.
A minute later, I found the cat at the terminus of the channel. We were in the dead end of a blind hollow, with exposed grassy hills rising steeply on three sides. They were so steep, in fact, that I could not scale them quickly enough to elude the two searchers who were surely pursuing on foot. Boxed in. Trapped.
Driftwood, tangled balls of dead weeds and grass, and silt were mounded at the end of the wash. I half expected the cat to give me an evil Cheshire grin, white teeth gleaming in the gloom. Instead, it scampered to the pile of debris and slinked-wriggled into one of many small gaps, disappearing again.
This
was
a wash. Therefore the runoff had to go somewhere when it reached this point.
Hastily I climbed the nine-foot-long, three-foot-high slope of packed debris, which sagged and rattled and crunched but held beneath me. It was all drifted against a grid of steel bars, which served as a vertical grate across the mouth of a culvert set into the side of the hill.
Beyond the grate was a six-foot-diameter concrete drain between anchoring concrete buttresses. It was apparently part of a flood-control project that carried storm water out of the hills, under the Pacific Coast Highway, into drains beneath the streets of Moonlight Bay, and finally to the sea.
A couple of times each winter, maintenance crews would clear the trash away from the grate to prevent water flow from being completely impeded. Clearly, they had not been here recently.
Inside the culvert, the cat meowed. Magnified, its voice echoed with a new sepulchral tone along the concrete tunnel.
The openings in the steel-bar grid were four-inch squares, wide enough to admit the supple cat but not wide enough for me. The grate extended the width of the opening, from buttress to buttress, but it didn’t reach all the way to the top.
I swung legs-first and backward through the two-foot-high gap between the top of the grate and the curved ceiling of the drain. I was grateful that the grid had a headrail, for otherwise I would have been poked and gouged painfully by the exposed tops of the vertical bars.
Leaving the stars and the moon behind, I stood with my back to the grate, peering into absolute blackness. I had to hunch only slightly to keep from bumping my head against the ceiling.
The smell of damp concrete and moldering grass, not entirely unpleasant, wafted from below.
I eased forward, sliding my feet. The smooth floor of the culvert had only a slight pitch. After just a few yards, I stopped, afraid I would blunder into a sudden drop-off and wind up dead or broken-backed at the bottom.
I withdrew the butane lighter from a pocket of my jeans, but I was reluctant to strike a flame. The light flickering along the curved walls of the culvert would be visible from outside.
The cat called again, and its radiant eyes were all that I could see ahead. Guessing at the distance between us, judging by the angle at which I looked down upon the animal, I deduced that the floor of the huge culvert continued at an increased—but not drastic—slope.
I proceeded cautiously toward the lambent eyes. When I drew close to the creature, it turned away, and I halted at the loss of its twin beacons.
Seconds later it spoke again. Its green gaze reappeared and fixed unblinking on me.
Edging forward once more, I marveled at this odd experience. All that I had witnessed since sundown—the theft of my father’s body, the battered and eyeless corpse in the crematorium, the pursuit from the mortuary—was incredible, to say the least, but for sheer strangeness, nothing equaled the behavior of this small descendant of tigers.
Or maybe I was making a lot more of the moment than it deserved, attributing to this simple house cat an awareness of my plight that it didn’t actually possess.
Maybe.
Blindly, I came to another mound of debris smaller than the first. Unlike the previous heap, this one was damp. The flotsam squished beneath my shoes, and a sharper stench rose from it.
I clambered forward, cautiously groping at the darkness in front of me, and I discovered that the debris was packed against another steel-bar grate. Whatever trash managed to wash over the top of the first grate was caught here.
After climbing this barrier and crossing safely to the other side, I risked using the lighter. I cupped my hand around the flame to contain and direct the glow as much as possible.
The cat’s eyes blazed bright: gold now, flecked with green. We stared at each other for a long moment, and then my guide—if that’s what it was—whipped around and sprinted out of sight, down into the drain.
Using the lighter to find my way, keeping the flame low to conserve butane, I descended through the heart of the coastal hills, passing smaller tributary culverts that opened into this main line. I arrived at a spillway of wide concrete steps on which were puddles of stagnant water and a thin carpet of hardy gray-black fungus that probably thrived only during the four-month rainy season. The scummy steps were treacherous, but for the safety of maintenance crews, a steel handrail was bolted to one wall, hung now with a drab tinsel of dead grass deposited by the most recent flood.
As I descended, I listened for the sounds of pursuit, voices in the tunnel behind me, but all I heard were my own stealthy noises. Either the searchers had decided that I hadn’t escaped by way of the culvert—or they had hesitated so long before following me into the drain that I had gotten well ahead of them.
At the bottom of the spillway, on the last two broad steps, I almost plunged into what I thought at first were the pale, rounded caps of large mushrooms, clusters of vile-looking fungi growing here in the lightless damp, no doubt poisonous in the extreme.
Clutching the railing, I eased past sprouting forms on the slippery concrete, reluctant to touch them even with one of my shoes. Standing in the next length of sloping tunnel, I turned to examine this peculiar find.
When I cranked up the flame on the lighter, I discovered that before me lay not mushrooms but a collection of skulls. The fragile skulls of birds. The elongated skulls of lizards. The larger skulls of what might have been cats, dogs, raccoons, porcupines, rabbits, squirrels….
Not a scrap of flesh adhered to any of these death’s-heads, as if they had been boiled clean: white and yellow-white in the butane light, scores of them, perhaps a hundred. No leg bones, no rib cages, just skulls. They were arranged neatly side by side in three rows—two on the bottom step and one on the second from the bottom—facing out, as though, even with their empty eye sockets, they were here to bear witness to something.