Douglas Nelson - Cat On A Blue Monday

Temple peered around the edge of the refrigerator.

The flashlight's erratic beam illuminated the pantry. A figure, humped and twisted, hunkered before the closed basement door. A big burlap bag lay on the floor, obviously filled with something.

Temple's horror-movie mentality filled in the blanks. Dirt from a basement grave? A pod person left by aliens? Dead cats?

No, live cats. The bag had moved, though the semi-human silhouette was turned away and did not see.

"Heav-y dev-il," came the singsong voice again as the figure turned to lift its burden. "You'll swing for it from the church door. Pox vobiscum ." A chuckle punctuated the gibberish.

Whoever it was bent over farther to hoist the bag up on a shoulder, straighten to human height . . . and spot Temple.

Like a rabbit, she took off, through the dark and the cats, feeling things fly from her milling feet--tinfoil food dishes, water dishes (she felt her ankles splashed), surprised cat bodies.

She heard equipment--flashlight, bag, bowie knives, boomerangs, bullwhips, whatever--thump to the floor, and heard the softer thump of running shoes behind her. Like a jogger downtown, yeah, coming up from behind on the poor ordinary walker.

Temple's ankle crashed painfully into a barrier that would not give, twisting her foot until the high heel slipped sideways. A step. She didn't want to climb, but had no choice. Maybe she could find Sister Mary Monica's window and heave a brick through it; all right, heave her tote bag through it. Then she could scream out the open window, and by the time anybody came, the bogeyman from the basement would have ground her bones to powder.

Temple stumbled upward on her shaky heels, tripped and banged her knees on the steep steps. She was upright and running again before the pain registered. When her foot lifted and came down on level ground, she almost jolted herself into losing balance. Teetering on her high heels, she glanced back.

Darkness was rushing up the dark stairs. A shape like wind incarnate, as black as the night around it. No pale pattern of face or hands, just darkness.

Temple rushed down the hall, not wanting to bottle herself in a room but having little choice. She felt an open doorway and dashed through. She slammed the door shut behind her, knowing it wouldn't lock, and felt for something to drag across it.

At her back, the subconscious warmth of light beckoned. She found a trunk and push/pulled/kicked it in front of the door. It was heavy: maybe there was a body in it. Then she had to turn and see the light. Now there was a phrase for religious revelation-- She recognized Miss Tyler's vintage dressing table, saw it clearly . . . fire was creeping across its dusty surface, up behind its round mirror, around its twin columns of drawers.

Fire! And in a house full of cats. Temple grabbed a small round rag rug from the floor and began beating at the dresser--top, bottom, behind. Flames flared from the wind, then sank at the first blows. The dark returned, and so did the sounds. The scrape of the trunk as it groaned across the wooden floor. Wooden floor--oh, no! The floor would catch like tinder and drop into the rooms below and turn this place into an inferno, and she was stuck on the second floor. Forget cats! What about her?

Temple cast away the smoky, charred mat and caught up another of the pesky rugs. They worked pretty good as fire dampers. The dresser, made of old, tough mahogany, was slow to catch flame. Temple continued to beat the flames down into the dark from which they sprang, thinking. The fire had not been meant to flare until the person who set it was out of the basement and the house.

Now that person was up here, with her. What to fight first? Fire, the unknown intruder or her own fear? She ran to the window, a blotch of gray beside the bed, grabbed the bedside table--a spindly, old-fashioned model that would probably splinter, she remembered--and hurled it at the window glass. Once, twice, three times until they shattered together,

glass and wood.

In the dark of night, the sound was small, liable to be mistaken for a pint of whiskey dropped in an alley, or dogs overturning garbage cans again. In neighboring houses, television sets were blaring and windows were shut against the heat, air conditioners humming away and muffling all exterior sounds.

But some people in this neighborhood were too poor for central air conditioning, and their windows stayed open on a pleasantly cool, early autumn night--

"Fire!" she yelled, as instructed to do in case of rape. "Fire!" It really is!

Her answer came from behind, a white, suspended object that closed in on her face like a wisp of cloud smelling of hospitals.

At first the wet coolness was a balm to her overheated face. Then the sickly odor seeped into her nostrils and some force kept it pressed there. Chloroform. And a fire. If she passed out now, she was French toast.

Lessons. Do the unexpected. Don't tense, relax.

She went limp, let herself sink, against all her instincts, into the unseen person behind her. Air, blessed air, slipped between her face and the encompassing cloth.

It was enough. She ducked, half falling, and spun to face her attacker, grabbing her tote bag by the handles and swinging it in an arc over her shoulder. At the same time, she kicked a heel into what she hoped was the right height for a knee.

Her bag connected with a solid something.

"Jesus Christ!" hissed a voice that was neither man nor woman, neither brute nor human. Jesssusss Chrissst. The caller! No face to recognize, only a burlap-sack mask over the head, glaring at her as expressionlessly as Freddie Kreuger's sinister hockey mask.

Temple's left hand was digging in her bag for the big brass ring and came up with keys bristling between every knuckle.

A strong hand grabbed the bag from her grasp, but she had ducked to the floor and now she felt with her right hand until it closed over a smooth wooden pin--one of the table legs.

She struck again at the shadow closing on her. Struck for the side of the neck and the carotid artery underneath the thin skin. Hit right, hit hard enough, and cause instant unconsciousness.

The impact jolted her arm and shoulder, even as she lurched to her braced feet. Matt would disapprove of the incapacitating high heels, but she hadn't had time to lose the shoes. She did now. The dark form had crumpled to the floor. She bent and snatched off her shoes, then glanced at the dressing table. It had flared again. The mirror, framed in

tangerine curlicues, reflected a faint image of her own figure, her face haloed by wildly disheveled red curls. She resembled a barbecued cherub. This fire was getting too hot for her to handle, even with a rag rug.

She stepped toward the door.

A hand closed around her ankle.

Temple gave. Fell, still facing the half-open door with the trunk against it.

She turned and kicked out both stocking feet, as hard as she could, then leaned inward and struck out with the table leg, again and again, until it met resistance, until it knocked on bone and her ankle was free.

She scrabbled away, eeled out the door.

In the distance, someone screamed and kept on screaming.

She was sure it wasn't her. She was running downstairs in the dark, feeling soft, furred forms fleeing at her passage, like fish in an unlit tropical sea.

Oh, poor kitties!

The screaming grew louder and sounded like a siren.

She was at the bottom of the stairs when she heard their top echo to soft-thudding feet descending in a staccato beat.

Then she tripped. On level ground, and she tripped over another of those cursed rag rugs. She pushed it away, but it was heavy and . . . warm . . . and heaving and scratching.

The big front door heaved, too, and then groaned as something hit it from without. A few more crashing blows and solid wood splintered like veneer. The door broke open, swinging against the wall on screaming hinges. More horror show effects: huge, clumsy figures filled the opening, backlit by lurid red.