Robin Hobb - The Inheritance and Other Stories

I didn’t see Lonnie for a while. I took a different route home from school, used a different door into my building. I pretended that if I didn’t see her, I wasn’t avoiding her. I liked her, but her problems were just too scary. I tried not to think about her, but my hand kept finding the extra vial of pepper spray in my coat pocket. Then one afternoon at four o’clock, I turned off the TV and put on my coat. I wrote Mom a note. I left the apartment.

It was dark but at least it wasn’t raining. I walked fast, glad there were no boys hanging out around her building tonight. I wondered how I’d know which door was hers. I wondered if I’d have the guts to knock. But I didn’t have to. Lonnie knelt on the ground by the Dumpster. The single parking lot light illuminated at least a dozen orange outlines of cats on the pavement. As I watched, another one slowly formed on the ground in front of Lonnie. I went to her.

The area around the Dumpster was littered with sprawled cat bodies. A terrible noise was coming from Lonnie as she painted around them. Uh, huh, huh. The noise people make when they can’t cry. I was afraid to get too close to her. She crawled to the next cat and began outlining it.

“What happened?” I whispered into the darkness.

She looked up, startled. Even in the dimness, I could see she was broken. “I don’t know,” she choked out when she recognized me. “I don’t know. They weren’t hit by cars, they weren’t killed by dogs. They’re just dead. I just don’t know.” She sank down in defeat on the dirty pavement. “My strays. My loyal subjects.” Her hand rested on one dead cat like a benediction. Behind her, a small kitten mewed questioningly in the bushes. “I got nothing left,” she told me sadly. She shook her head. “I fought and I fought. But I still lost. In the end, it all got taken away.” She seemed to get smaller.

“Lonnie!” Carl called from the window. He leaned out, craning to see her. “Lonnie, you down there? You got my stuff?”

It was the wrong time to ask her that. She came to her feet like a puppet hauled up on its strings. “No!” she screeched back. “No, I don’t!” Then, in a plea for understanding, “Carl, my cats are dead! Something killed them.” Her voice broke on the words.

“Oh, no, really?” His voice shook. “That’s awful, Lonnie. That’s just terrible.” Then he laughed out loud, and I knew he’d been holding it back all along. “Well, maybe someone poisoned the fuckers so you’d quit wasting time on them. Quit sniveling and go get my stuff. Now!”

Her hands flew up to her face in horror. Speechless, she stared into the darkness beyond the Dumpsters. When she dropped her hands a moment later, her painty fingers had left fluorescent tabby-cat stripes on both her cheeks.

I couldn’t believe what happened next. She didn’t even look at me. She limped straight to the door of her building. She obediently went inside. Lonnie had stopped fighting.

The kitten found me. I felt her tiny claws in my sock. I picked her up. She was skinny and her little mouth opened hugely when she cried. “You’ve got the wrong person,” I told her. I set her down and walked away.

Then I heard the sound. Not a shout. A roar, like the roar of a lioness, wordless in her fury. It came from the window above. Carl yelled back but it was a startled shout, full of dismay. I couldn’t see much, but I saw her shadow crash into his, her fists pummeling at his face and chest. For an instant I thought that she could win. But it was still a boy’s game. I heard his answering roar of anger. He seized her by the upper arms, lifted her off her feet, and threw her.

She hit the window. The glass shattered, flying out like a cloud of diamonds. Lonnie fell with it, twisting and yowling.

I did a stupid thing. Somehow I had the pepper spray in my hand and I pointed it up at the window. Lonnie seemed to be falling forever. I saw Carl look out as she fell; I even saw the shock on his face, heard someone else in the room behind him scream.

Then I squeezed the button and enveloped myself in a cloud of pepper gas. Carl was too far away. Even finally knowing when to fight, I thought to myself, was not enough. People like Carl still won. Blinded and choking, I fell to my knees as Lonnie struck the ground. Broken glass rang in a brittle rain with her.

Everything in the world stopped. I didn’t kneel by her, I crumpled. I tried to touch her but I couldn’t. I wasn’t Lonnie, to touch death without fear. Then she lifted her head. She looked at me and her mouth opened. As if she moved a mountain, she turned her head. Her lips pulled back. With her last breath, she lifted her upper lip and snarled up at the window that framed Carl.

Summoned, the cats came. The queen’s loyal subjects poured forth to her call. Without a rustle of leaves, without a patter of paws, they came. Orange shapes flickered in the night. They came in a wave that became a tide. From the bushes in back of the Dumpster, from under cars, from the distant streets, from everywhere, they came. They flooded the parking lot. A score, a hundred, five hundred fluorescent orange silhouettes lit the night as they answered her call. I saw Carl stagger back from the window. Like living flames, the cats licked up the side of the building, over the sill, and through the broken glass. The rumble of their snarls were like a big truck idling. The parking lot was darker when the last one disappeared inside. The hissing and spitting and caterwauling from up there almost drowned his screams.

Mom’s headlights hit me just about the same time the cats poured out of the window again. Like molten gold or streaming honey, they flowed down the side of the building. They engulfed Lonnie and me. I felt the warmth of a hundred small bodies, the soft swipe of velvet paws as they rushed past and over me to get to her. I swear I saw them, and I swear I felt them.

They purred all over Lonnie, they marked her with their brows, they bumped her with their fluorescent noses. They nudged and they pleaded and they nagged, pushing at her body. They kneaded it with their paws demandingly, scores of little fluorescent paws pushing at her yielding flesh, making her smaller and more compact, re-creating her in a new and perfect image.

The Queen of the Strays sat up groggily. She blinked her great amber eyes. She lifted a velvet paw to swipe at her tabby face. She stood and she stretched, showing me four sets of razor claws and four powerful legs attached to a lithe and perfect body.

“Lonnie?” I asked incredulously.

The cat shrugged one shoulder.

In the next instant, Lonnie was gone. The tidal wave of fluorescent cats retreated, and she padded off in the midst of them. The great orange glow surged into the blackberry tangle. Their light dwindled as they faded into the thorny jungle of vines. Then it winked out. Lonnie was gone and my mom was there going, “Oh, my God, my God. Get in the car, Mandy. Right now. Get in the car.”

I did. We were halfway home before I noticed the tiny black-and-white kitten that was stuck to my sock like a burr. When I put it in my lap, it curled up and began to purr.

Idon’t know what Mom saw that night. She says I had pepper gas in my eyes and that I couldn’t have seen anything. The papers said that a junkie whore got mad at her pimp and cut him to ribbons with a razor. The papers never even mentioned Lonnie.

No one ever wonders what happens to strays when they disappear.

I hope her next eight lives are better than this one was.

Sometimes it seems to me that the public appetite for certain types of stories comes and goes in waves. It’s most visible, I think, on television. There is a decade of westerns, a decade of doctor shows, followed by a decade of forensic scientists or vampires or rich teenager tales.