Diana Dueyn - The Big Meow

One more page came out of the typewriter and went down onto the desk, and another page was rolled in, and the machine-gun-fast typing started again. As it came down and the last words vanished under the new page, Rhiow heard something she had never heard before, and hoped never to hear again: the Whisperer yowling low in Her throat, in great and increasing distress.

The fur bristling all over her, Rhiow craned her neck to look down at the new page. Hwaith leapt up onto the bookshelf beside her. Did you hear that? Rhiow said silently, to both him and Urruah.

Hwaith’s eyes were as wide as Urruah’s were. Yes, Hwaith said: and, I wish I hadn’t, said Urruah.

“This is unusual,” says Mike the Mick. “She has not yet offered to save our souls. That is usually the blowoff that follows such a pitch.”

“For the sacrifice has been made in full, though mindlessly,” says the doll in black, as a big Ford goes by her and she pays it not a red cent’s worth of mind. “And mindfully it is made now, three times three; and the Black Leopard receives it, and the end time is set in train. Exult then, fanged ones, exult in the hour of night when the prophecy is at last made real, and the worthless worlds are made an end of, and the Black One gorges Himself full on the corpse that is all Life.”

And she walks on by us, right down that white line, and pauses at the intersection of Hollywood and Highland and then hangs a left and vanishes around the corner of the hotel. And we stand there being quiet, since though we are all always being told that we are doomed, it rarely gets done quite like this.

“Now there is a lady who is minus at least one banana from the bunch,” says Kip the Cyp.

“The City ought to do something,” says Miss Dora. “What are we paying our taxes for?”

And they all go back inside through the beautiful brass rotating door of the Hollywood Hotel, with Mike the Mick and myself being the last ones to go. “It is strange that she did not try to charge us the usual rate,” says Mike the Mick, “which always involves some kind of meeting up in the rich part of the hills and a great forking over of cash.”

“Now where is she gone to?” I say.

“Let us go see,” says Mike the Mick. “But I do not think we will see much.”

We go up to the corner of Hollywood and Highland, and as we go it commences to rain, which is a peculiar thing out of what seems like a clear sky, but then with the lights as bright as they are on Hollywood Boulevard these days, it is often hard to tell what is going on up in the aether. And when we look up Highland, there is no sign of her.

“For a doll dressed like that she moves fast,” I say to Mike the Mick.

“This I have seen before,” says Mike. “But there is never anyone there to pick her up in a car, and I sometimes think she must slip into one of the apartment buildings up Highland, but there is no sign of her doing so, and no one up there seems to know about her, for once or twice when I have a slow lunch hour I go up there to ask a few questions, and no one shows any sign of having been bought off, which I would surely detect by now.”

So we head back in the direction of the Hollywood Hotel, and Mike the Mick says, “I have seen the Lady in Black three months running now, and I do not know whether I should buy some more umbrellas when I see her, or throw them away.” Because as we walk back up the Boulevard, the street where it was raining is now as dry as any number of bones.

Now we have plenty of ghosts here but none of them can dry the street up after a rain, and I wonder whether the City should try to procure her services in the flood season. Yet if the Lady in Black is in fact producing the rain, then a joe with a smart head could use her to make a lot of moolah out of the LA County Flood Control Board. But no one can catch her long enough to figure out which side she should be working for, or against, which is annoying and also too much like life.

The Silent Man stopped typing, and stared at the paper.

Rhiow looked at Hwaith. “I thought you said it wasn’t going to rain until October,” Urruah said.

Hwaith shrugged his tail. “Poetic license,” he said. “Anyway, it didn’t rain last night. At least, not anywhere else…”

Rhiow was beyond being all that concerned about the weather. She was bristling still, and still hearing the silent distress of Hrau’f the Silent, of one of the Powers that Be, over something long-dreaded, half-expected, now coming terribly true. In the meantime, the Silent Man had stopped typing, and was staring at the half-finished page in the typewriter. I hate it when these things don’t have an obvious ending… Rhiow heard him think.

Then Rhiow stepped down onto the Silent Man’s desk, because now – however bizarre it seemed – she understood what she needed to do. She sat down by the right side of the typewriter, and stared at him until he felt the weight of her regard and looked her in the eye.

“Cousin,” she said in the Speech, “I am on errantry, and in the Queen’s name, I greet you. Now let’s talk business.”

And the Silent Man didn’t move an inch except that his eyebrows went right up.

The Big Meow: Chapter Five

You don’t look English, the Silent Man said.

Rhiow threw a glance at Urruah. “Did I miss something?” she said.

Urruah tilted his head to one side, looking thoughtful. But before he could say anything, the Silent Man said, We’ve got a lot of Brits around here. They’re real big on the Queen.

“Ah,” Rhiow said. “I take your meaning now.” She purred, slightly amused. “You mean the queen-ehhif whose territory includes London. No, sorry, not that Queen. We have one of our own, who is of…for the moment, let’s just say a higher order.”

Those very cool eyes rested on Rhiow for a moment, and the Silent Man’s hand went off to one side, as if searching for something that wasn’t there. Then he very visibly brought the hand back to rest in front of the typewriter, and put the other hand down on top of it, as if intent on keeping the first one where it was.

“Am I meant to understand,” Rhiow said, trying not to sound too threatening about it, “that you have no problem with the idea that a cat might be able to speak?”

Oh, on the contrary, the Silent Man said, I’m thinking that this all probably has something to do with the medication. They keep telling me they’re sure they’ve got the dosage right now; but every time they say that, I get some strange new side effect. He gave Rhiow a rather cockeyed look, though again it had that cool, assessing quality to it. I’ll grant you, though, this side effect’s a lot stranger than some. And I usually don’t get them this late in my day…

“I’ve been called a lot of things in my time,” Urruah said in the Speech, “but never a side effect.”

The Silent Man looked at him. One talking cat, he said, might have been an accident. Two starts to look like a coincidence –

“And three would be enemy action?” Urruah said. I wonder, he added silently for Rhiow’s benefit, should we tell him that’s what we’re here about…?

I wouldn’t rush that, ‘Ruah. Look at him – he’s a bit on the brittle side, at the moment. And tired. Let the simplest part sink in first.

The Silent Man laughed, just a barely audible hissing sound. And a smart guy, too, he said to Urruah. Okay, you’re making the case for ‘hallucination’ a whole lot stronger now…

“I’m sorry if all this strains your sense of your grasp on reality,” Rhiow said, “but sometimes, to keep that reality in good order, such interventions become necessary.” She glanced at the page in the typewriter. “It would seem that you’ve seen something unusual: something that may have a bearing on the reason we’ve come here.”