Ellen Datlow - Tails of Wonder and Imagination

Except that this night he doesn’t quite say that, he says:

“Why should a dog, a horse, a cat have life,

And thou no breath at all?”

And his eyes are fixed on something off-stage right in the wings. Well, I couldn’t resist looking there myself. I was half-dazzled by the stage lights so I can’t be sure, but do you know for a second or two somewhere in the gloom I thought I did catch sight of two yellow cat’s eyes staring at the action on stage. Well, I can’t be sure because I had to get back to my job. I still had lines to say, but when I’d said my last ones—you remember—

“I have a journey, sir, shortly to go;

My master calls me, I must not say no.”—I look back into the wings, and there’s nothing there. The eyes had gone.

Next day was a matinee day and before the first house Roddy summoned me to his dressing room. He seemed very excited.

He said: “I think I’ve got a way to nail the little bugger. You see this?” He held up a transparent plastic phial, the kind you pee into for doctors. It had about a centimetre of white powder in it. “Know what that is?” He didn’t wait for my answer. “Strychnine. Don’t ask me how I got it. Had to pull a few strings. One of the few advantages of being ‘Sir Roderick’ is that you can occasionally pull a string or two. I’m going to put it in some milk and put the milk in a saucer in my dressing room and when that damn cat comes, it is going to drink that milk. All cats like milk, don’t they?”

I said I was no expert, but I understood that cats liked milk.

He said: “Right! That damn cat’s going to die and all our troubles are over!”

I couldn’t help feeling that Roddy had got things rather out of proportion, but he seemed exhilarated and that afternoon a slightly sparse audience got the performance of a lifetime. By the end of it Roddy was clearly exhausted, which worried me, but something was keeping him alight. He seemed—what’s the word I’m looking for?—febrile, that’s it, and it worried me.

That was why I decided to look in on him in his dressing room just before the half-hour call for the evening show. I knocked on the door which was slightly ajar but got no reply, so I looked in.

Roddy had not got out of his last act costume or his make-up. He was lying on the floor of his dressing room, arms outstretched. He didn’t look to me as if he was breathing. Beside him on the floor was an empty bowl. At the corners of his half-open mouth were little droplets of liquid which looked to me like milk.

But that was not the worst of it. Crouched on his chest was the biggest damned cat I’ve ever seen in my life. Its fur was shaggy and grey—it looked like a great ball of dirty smoke—and its angry eyes were a bright sulphur yellow. Slowly it arched its back and gave me a low, stertorous hiss like the sudden escape of steam from an engine under pressure.

You don’t believe me? Well, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

I ran to get the Company Stage Manager and when we got back to Number One dressing room, Roddy was still there on the floor, but the cat had gone. We phoned for an ambulance and they carted him off to hospital but it wasn’t any good. He was dead as mutton: heart failure apparently. I said nothing about the strychnine business because I thought it would only muddy the waters, and it probably wasn’t relevant.

That night, for the first and last time in my life, I went on for Roddy as King Lear. Did I tell you I was his understudy? Made a pretty good fist of it too, though I says it as shouldn’t. Standing ovation and all that.

“Godders,” Roddy used to say to me, “you’re a good actor. Devilish good, but you haven’t enough personality to worry a leading man.” Well, he should have seen me that night! What? Another Bell’s? Oh, all right, just this once, since you’re twisting my arm. Cheers!

Nancy Etchemendy lives in Northern California and has been publishing fiction and poetry for twenty-five years. Though she is best known for her children’s books, she has also published several dozen stories for adults, mainly dark fantasy and horror. Her work has won three Bram Stoker Awards (two for children’s horror), a Golden Duck Award for excellence in children’s science fiction, and an International Horror Guild Award. Cat in Glass and Other Tales of the Unnatural , her collection of dark fantasy for young adults, was on the American Library Association’s Best Books for Young Adults list for 2003.

She says: “When my sister, Cecily, and I were three or four years old, my dad brought a male kitten home from the auto shop where he worked. We named it Ralph. At first Ralph was a nice little kitten who liked to be cuddled. But as he grew to un-neutered adulthood, he became enormous and wild, and spent more and more of his time outdoors hunting and fighting with other cats. He only came home to eat and sleep, and he frequently had large, suppurating wounds. His fur stuck out in tufts. He smelled terrible, and if we tried to pet him, he would hiss.

“One day Cecily and I decided we were going to get back at him for being so mean. Each of us took one end of a spool of crochet thread. We ran in opposite directions around poor old Ralph until he was wrapped in thread, hissing, growling and spitting. We were between him and the open door, so when he finally got loose, he came right at us. The sight, sound, and stink of that huge, ugly tom cat fighting his way free of the thread was truly terrifying. I’m half scared of cats to this day. Even though I’ve given good homes to a couple of them over the years, I’ve never gotten over the feeling that if the mood struck, a cat would happily scratch off its master’s face. I much prefer dogs.”

I was once a respectable woman. Oh, yes, I know that’s what they all say when they’ve reached a pass like mine: I was well educated, well traveled, had lovely children and a nice husband with a good financial mind. How can anyone have fallen so far, except one who deserved to anyway? I’ve had time aplenty to consider the matter, lying here eyeless in this fine hospital bed while the stench of my wounds increases. The matrons who guard my room are tight-lipped. But I heard one of them whisper yesterday, when she thought I was asleep, “Jesus, how could anyone do such a thing?” The answer to all these questions is the same. I have fallen so far, and I have done what I have done, to save us each and every one from the Cat in Glass .

My entanglement with the cat began fifty-two years ago, when my sister Delia was attacked by an animal. It happened on an otherwise ordinary spring afternoon. There were no witnesses. My father was still in his office at the college, and I was dawdling along on my way home from first grade at Chesly Girls’ Day School, counting cracks in the sidewalk. Delia, younger than I by three years, was alone with Fiona, the Irish woman who kept house for us. Fiona had just gone outside for a moment to hang laundry. She came in to check on Delia and discovered a scene of almost unbelievable carnage. Oddly, she had heard no screams.

As I ran up the steps and opened our door, I heard screams indeed. Not Delia’s—for Delia had nothing left to scream with—but Fiona’s, as she stood in the front room with her hands over her eyes.

She couldn’t bear the sight. Unfortunately, six-year-olds have no such compunction. I stared long and hard, sick and trembling, yet entranced.

From the shoulders up, Delia was no longer recognizable as a human being. Her throat had been shredded and her jaw ripped away. Most of her hair and scalp were gone. There were long, bloody furrows in the creamy skin of her arms and legs. The organdy pinafore in which Fiona had dressed her that morning was clotted with blood, and the blood was still coming. Some of the walls were even spattered with it where the animal, whatever it was, had worried her in its frenzy. Her fists and heels banged jerkily against the floor. Our pet dog, Freddy, lay beside her, also bloody, but quite limp. Freddy’s neck was broken.