Uncollected Stories 2003 (9 page)

Halston swallowed hard and heard a dry click in his throat. "And the
cat came back?"
Drogan nodded. "A week later. On the day Dick Gage was buried, as a
matter of fact. Just like the old song says. The cat came back."
"It survived a car crash at sixty? Hard to believe."
"They say each one has nine lives. When it comes back...that's when I
started to wonder if it might not be a...a..."
"Hellcat?" Halston suggested softly.
"For want of a better word, yes. A sort of demon sent ..."
"To punish you."
"I don't know. But I'm afraid of it. I feed it, or rather, the woman who
comes in to do for me feeds it. She doesn't like it either. She says that
face is a curse of God. Of course, she's local." The old man tried to
smile and failed. "I want you to kill it. I've lived with it for the last four
months. It skulks around in the shadows. It looks at me. It seems to be
... waiting. I lock myself in my room every night and still I wonder if
I'm going to wake up one early and find it...curled up on my chest...and
purring."
The wind whined lonesomely outside and made a strange hooting
noise in the stone chimney.
"At last I got in touch with Saul Loggia. He recommended you. He
called you a stick, I believe."
"A one-stick. That means I work on my own."
"Yes. He said you'd never been busted, or even suspected. He said you
always seem to land on your feet...like a cat."
Halston looked at the old man in the wheelchair. And his long-
fingered, muscular hands were lingering above the cat's neck.
"I'll do it now, if you want me to," he said softly. "I'll snap its neck. It
won't even know – "
"No!" Drogan cried. He drew in a long, shuddering breath. Color had
come up in his sallow cheeks. "Not...not here. Take it away."
Halston smiled humorlessly. He began to stroke the sleeping cat's
head and shoulders and back very gently again. "All right," he said. "I
accept the contract. Do you want the body?"
"No. Kill it. Bury it." He paused. He hunched forward in the
wheelchair like some ancient buzzard. "Bring me the tail," he said. "So I
can throw it in the fire and watch it burn."
Halston drove a 1973 Plymouth with a custom Cyclone Spoiler
engine. The car was jacked and blocked, and rode with the hood
pointing down at the road at a twenty degree angle. He had rebuilt the
differential and the rear end himself. The shift was a Pensy, the linkage
was Hearst. It sat on huge Bobby Unser Wide Ovals and had a top end
of a little past one-sixty. He left the Drogan house at a little past 9:30. A
cold rind of crescent moon rode overhead through the tattering
November clouds. He rode with all the windows open, because that
yellow stench of age and terror seemed to have settled into his clothes
and he didn't like it. The cold was hard and sharp, eventually numbing,
but it was good. It was blowing that yellow stench away. He got off the
turnpike at Placer's Glen and drove through the silent town, which was
guarded by a single yellow blinker at the intersection, at a thoroughly
respectable thirty-five. Out of town, moving up S.R. 35, he opened the
Plymouth up a little, letting her walk. The tuned Spoiler engine purred
like the cat had purred on his lap earlier this evening. Halston grinned at
the simile. They moved between frost-white November fields full of
skeleton cornstalks at a little over seventy.
The cat was in a double-thickness shopping bag, tied at the top with
heavy twine. The bag was in the passenger bucket seat. The cat had
been sleepy and purring when Halston put it in, and it had purred
through the entire ride. It sensed, perhaps, that Halston liked it and felt
at home with it. Like himself, the cat was a one-stick. Strange hit,
Halston thought, and was surprised to find that he was taking it
seriously as a hit. Maybe the strangest thing about it was that he actually
liked the cat, felt a kinship with it. If it had managed to get rid of those
three old crocks, more power to it...especially Gage, who had been
taking it to Milford for a terminal date with a crew-cut veterinarian who
would have been more than happy to bundle it into a ceramic-lined gas
chamber the size of a microwave oven. He felt a kinship but no urge to
renege on the hit. He would do it the courtesy of killing it quickly and
well. He would park off the road beside one of those November-barren
fields and take it out of the bag and stroke it and then snap its neck and
sever its tail with his pocketknife.
And, he thought, the body I'll bury honorably, saving it from the
scavengers. I can't save it from the worms, but I can save it from the
maggots.
He was thinking these things as the car moved through the night like a
dark blue ghost and that was when the cat walked in front of his eyes,
up on the dashboard, tail raised arrogantly, its black-and-white face
turned toward him, its mouth seeming to grin at him.
"
Ssssshhhh
– " Halston hissed. He glanced to his right and caught a
glimpse of the double-thickness shopping bag, a hole chewed – or
clawed – in its side. Looked ahead again…and the cat lifted a paw and
batted playfully at him. The paw skidded across Halston's forehead. He
jerked away from it and the Plymouth's big tires wailed on the road as it
swung erratically from one side of the narrow blacktop to the other.
Halston batted at the cat on the dashboard with his fist. It was blocking
his field of vision. It spat at him, arching its back, but it didn't move.
Halston swung again, and instead of shrinking away, it leaped at him.
Gage
, he thought.
Just like Gage
–

He stamped the brake. The cat was on his head, blocking his vision
with its furry belly, clawing at him, gouging at him. Halston held the
wheel grimly. He struck the cat once, twice, a third time. And suddenly
the road was gone, the Plymouth was running down into the ditch,
thudding up and down on its shocks. Then, impact, throwing him
forward against his seat belt, and the last sound he heard was the cat
yowling inhumanly, the voice of a woman in pain or in the throes of
sexual climax. He struck it with his closed fists and felt only the
springy, yielding flex of its muscles. Then, second impact. And
darkness.

The moon was down. It was an hour before dawn. The Plymouth lay in
a ravine curdled with groundmist. Tangled in its grille was a snarled
length of barbed wire. The hood had come unlatched, and tendrils of
steam from the breached radiator drifted out of the opening to mingle
with the mist. No feeling in his legs. He looked down and saw that the
Plymouth's firewall had caved in with the impact. The back of that big
Cyclone Spoiler engine block had smashed into his legs, pinning them.
Outside, in the distance, the predatory squawk of an owl dropping onto
some small, scurrying animal. Inside, close, the steady purr of the cat. It
seemed to be grinning, like Alice's Cheshire had in Wonderland.

As Halston watched it stood up, arched its back, and stretched. In a
sudden limber movement like rippled silk, it leaped to his shoulder.
Halston tried to lift his hands to push it off. His arms wouldn't move.
Spinal shock, he thought. Paralyzed. Maybe temporary. More likely
permanent. The cat purred in his ear like thunder.

"Get off me," Halston said. His voice was hoarse and dry. The cat
tensed for a moment and then settled back. Suddenly its paw batted
Halston's cheek, and the claws were out this time. Hot lines of pain
down to his throat. And the warm trickle of blood.

Pain.
Feeling.
He ordered his head to move to the right, and it complied. For a

moment his face was buried in smooth, dry fur. Halston snapped at the
cat. It made a startled, disgruntled sound in its throat –
yowk!
– and
leaped onto the seat. It stared up at him angrily, ears laid back.

"Wasn't supposed to do that, was I?" Halston croaked. The cat opened
its mouth and hissed at him. Looking at that strange, schizophrenic face,
Halston could understand how Drogan might have thought it was a
hellcat. It –

His thoughts broke off as he became aware of a dull, tingling feeling
in both hands and forearms. Feeling. Coming back. Pins and needles.
The cat leaped at his face, claws out, spitting. Halston shut his eyes and
opened his mouth. He bit at the cat's belly and got nothing but fur. The
cat's front claws were clasped on his ears, digging in. The pain was
enormous, brightly excruciating. Halston tried to raise his hands. They
twitched but would not quite come out of his lap. He bent his head
forward and began to shake it back and forth, like a man shaking soap
out of his eyes. Hissing and squalling, the cat held on. Halston could
feel blood trickling down his cheeks. It was hard to get his breath. The
cat's chest was pressed over his nose. It was possible to get some air in
by mouth, but not much. What he did get came through fur. His ears felt
as if they had been doused with lighter fluid and then set on fire.

He snapped his head back and cried out in agony – he must have
sustained a whiplash when the Plymouth hit. But the cat hadn't been
expecting the reverse and it flew off. Halston heard it thud down in the
back seat. A trickle of blood ran in his eye. He tried again to move his
hands, to raise one of them and wipe the blood away. They trembled in
his lap, but he was still unable to actually move them. He thought of the
.45 special in its holster under his left arm.
If I can get to my piece, kitty,
the rest of your nine lives are going in a lump sum
.

More tingles now. Dull throbs of pain from his feet, buried and surely
shattered under the engine block, zips and tingles from his legs – it felt
exactly the way a limb that you've slept on does when it's starting to
wake up. At that moment Halston didn't care about his feet. It was
enough to know that his spine wasn't severed, that he wasn't going to
finish out his life as a dead lump of body attached to a talking head.

Maybe I had a few lives left myself.
Take care of the cat. That was the first thing. Then get out of the
wreck – maybe someone would come along, that would solve both
problems at once. Not likely at 4:30 in the morning on a back road like
this one, but barely possible. And –
And what was the cat doing back there?
He didn't like having it on his face, but he didn't like having it behind
him and out of sight, either. He tried the rearview mirror, but that was
useless. The crash had knocked it awry and all it reflected was the
grassy ravine he had finished up in.
A sound from behind him, like low, ripping cloth.
Purring.
Hellcat my ass. It's gone to sleep back there.
And even if it hadn't, even if it was somehow planning murder, what
could it do? It was a skinny little thing, probably weighed all of four
pounds soaking wet. And soon ... soon he would be able to move his
hands enough to get his gun. He was sure of it. Halston sat and waited.
Feeling continued to flood back into his body in a series of
pins-andneedles incursions. Absurdly (or maybe in instinctive reaction
to his close brush with death) he got an erection for a minute or so.
Be kind of hard to beat off under present circumstances, he thought. A
dawn-line was appearing in the eastern sky. Somewhere a bird sang.
Halston tried his hands again and got them to move an eighth of an inch
before they fell back.
Not yet. But soon.
A soft thud on the seatback beside him. Halston turned his head and
looked into the black-white face, the glowing eyes with their huge dark
pupils.
Halston spoke to it.
"I have never blown a hit once I took it on, kitty. This could be a first.
I'm getting my hands back. Five minutes, ten at most. You want my
advice? Go out the window. They're all open. Go out and take your tail
with you."
The cat stared at him.
Halston tried his hands again. They came up, trembling wildly. Half
an inch. An inch. He let them fall back limply. They slipped off his lap
and thudded to the Plymouth's seat. They glimmered there palely, like
large tropical spiders.
The cat was grinning at him.
Did I make a mistake?,
he wondered confusedly. He was a creature of
hunch, and the feeling that he had made one was suddenly
overwhelming. Then the cat's body tensed, and even as it leaped,
Halston knew what it was going to do and he opened his mouth to
scream.
The cat landed on Halston's crotch, claws out, digging.
At that moment, Halston wished he had been paralyzed. The pain was
gigantic, terrible. He had never suspected that there could be such pain
in the world. The cat was a spitting coiled spring of fury, clawing at his
balls. Halston did scream, his mouth yawning open, and that was when
the cat changed direction and leaped at his face, leaped at his mouth.
And at that moment Halston knew that it was something more than a
cat. It was something possessed of a malign, murderous intent.
He caught one last glimpse of that black-and-white face below the
flattened ears, its eyes enormous and filled with lunatic hate. It had
gotten rid of the three old people and now it was going to get rid of John
Halston.
It rammed into his mouth, a furry projectile. He gagged on it. Its front
claws pinwheeled, tattering his tongue like a piece of liver. His stomach
recoiled and he vomited. The vomit ran down into his windpipe,
clogging it, and he began to choke. In this extremity, his will to survive
overcame the last of the impact paralysis. He brought his hands up
slowly to grasp the cat.
Oh my God
, he thought.
The cat was forcing its way into his mouth, flattening its body,
squirming, working itself farther and farther in. He could feel his jaws
creaking wider and wider to admit it.
He reached to grab it, yank it out, destroy it...and his hands clasped
only the cat's tail.
Somehow it had gotten its entire body into his mouth. Its strange,
black-and-white face must be crammed into his very throat. A terrible
thick gagging sound came from Halston's throat, which was swelling
like a flexible length of garden hose.
His body twitched. His hands fell back into his lap and the fingers
drummed senselessly on his thighs. His eyes sheened over, then glazed.
They stared out through the Plymouth's windshield blankly at the
coming dawn.
Protruding from his open mouth was two inches of bushy tail...half
black, half white. It switched lazily back and forth.
It disappeared.
A bird cried somewhere again. Dawn came in breathless silence then,
over the frost-rimmed fields of rural Connecticut.
The farmer's name was Will Reuss. He was on his way to Placer's
Glen to get the inspection sticker renewed on his farm truck when he
saw the late-morning sun twinkle on something in the ravine beside the
road. He pulled over and saw the Plymouth lying at a drunken, canted
angle in the ditch, barbed wire tangled in its grille like a snarl of steel
knitting. He worked his way down and then sucked in his breath
sharply.
"Holy moley," he muttered to the bright November day. There was a
guy sitting bolt upright behind the wheel, eyes open and glaring emptily
into eternity. The Roper organization was never going to include him in
its presidential poll again. His face was smeared with blood. He was still
wearing his seat belt.
The driver's door had been crimped shut, but Reuss managed to get it
open by yanking with both hands. He leaned in and unstrapped the seat
belt, planning to check for ID. He was reaching for the coat when he
noticed that the dead guy's shirt was rippling, just above the belt buckle.
Rippling...and bulging. Splotches of blood began to bloom there like
sinister roses.
"What the Christ?" He reached out, grasped the dead man's shirt, and
pulled it up.
Will Reuss looked – and screamed.
Above Halston's navel, a ragged hole had been clawed in his flesh.
Looking out was the gore-streaked black-and-white face of a cat, its
eyes huge and glaring. Reuss staggered back, shrieking, hands clapped
to his face. A score of crows took cawing wing from a nearby field. The
cat forced its body out and stretched in obscene languor. Then it leaped
out the open window. Reuss caught sight of it moving through the high
dead grass and then it was gone.
It seemed to be in a hurry, he later told a reporter from the local paper.
As if it had unfinished business.