Кроха - Dedication

Was his curiosity one of those moments Dulcie called cop sense? “Cop thought,” Dulcie would say. “Detective intuition? Feline intuition? Who knows?” Now, curling closer to her, Joe was glad she was beside him.

But then, heading for Ben’s place, the truck slowed too soon, in only a few blocks. Joe tried not to be seen in the side mirror as he reared up to peer out—at his own house. Why were they stopping? Did Ryan not want him and Dulcie in on the search, did she mean to haul them out and leave them? That would be tacky, she wouldn’t hear the last of that.

Or maybe she didn’t want Billy to know they were riding along. Billy was too perceptive, he was sure to wonder why the cats had hung around the crime scene and why now they wanted to ride up to Ben’s place. The cats trusted Billy, but enough people knew their secret: Ryan and Clyde, Wilma, Lucinda and Pedric, Kate Osborne, the Firettis. Every new confidant became, unwittingly, a new danger to them. One careless word, one innocent remark that might imply too much, and their cover could be destroyed.

Pulling into their drive, Ryan got out but didn’t turn back to the truck bed; she didn’t snatch the cats out and dump them on the lawn. She and Billy headed for the garage. Joe and Dulcie, slipping behind the tied-down lumber, watched the two return with three cat carriers and extra blankets, safe transport for Ben’s rescues. Ryan loaded these in the truck bed, hastily tying them in place as Billy stepped back in the cab. Ryan’s scowl into the shadows of the lumber said clearly, Stay out of sight! Stay out of the way and out of trouble or I’ll make trouble. Swinging into the truck, she headed up into the hills where crowding cottages overlooked a wild canyon, where Ben Stonewell had rented his small basement apartment.

10

In Anchorage, as Lucinda and Pedric Greenlaw prepared for their trip into Denali Park, worry still rode with them. They couldn’t get their minds off Kit. Shopping, adding a few things to their light backpacks for the trip, adding heavier boots and canvas jackets, they toured Anchorage for another half day—but all the while their minds were on Kit. As they walked the town’s rough streets, with the great, snowcapped peaks towering over them above the steep rooftops, unease nagged the gray-haired couple. Worry followed them as it had for the whole excursion, even as they thrilled at the sight of calving glaciers, at polar bears swimming in the icy waters and roaming the shores, at hundreds of bald eagles descending together toward an icy fjord. All the while, their thoughts didn’t leave Kit and Pan for long.

When Lucinda had asked Clyde on the phone if Kit and Pan were still gone, when he really couldn’t talk much, all he said was, “Yes, they are, Lucinda . . .” Someone came into the room, and then shortly they had hung up. Not a satisfactory discussion. She knew he’d call when they did return. Meanwhile, she and Pedric fretted. Lucinda pictured the two cats back in the village curled before a warming hearth fire, maybe with Kate in the downstairs apartment or with Wilma and Dulcie. If she thought hard enough, maybe she could make it happen.

But Kit and Pan were not curled before any fire. They were shivering cold, their paws nearly frozen as they clawed up through the dark earthen tunnels, up and up the wet, slick boulders, climbed in blackness, leaving the Netherworld behind them.

They had taken their leave with tears and with longing from that land of green light, of rolling fields and jagged cliffs, that realm of gentle unicorns and dwarves and elven folk; from the short-tempered Harpy who had carried them aloft winging through the green glow of the Netherworld’s granite sky.

They had left their own kind, too. Had left behind the small clowder of speaking feral cats with whom they had traveled down from their own land, who had chosen to stay longer in the one Netherworld realm that welcomed and understood their singular feline race.

The green light followed them into the tunnel for only a little way, staining the ragged walls but quickly growing dim, eaten up by shadows. Kit grieved at leaving but she yearned for home, for her own loved ones. They trotted close together, Kit’s mottled black and gray coat dark against the heavy stone walls, Pan’s red-gold coat glowing for a little while and then darkness swallowed them.

In the Netherworld they had stayed clear of the blighted kingdoms to the west that had long ago grown corrupt and lost their own magic. They had cleaved to the one small country where life still throbbed with the bright hopes and endeavors of its peoples, the one unspoiled corner of that lost and phantasmic world.

Now, ahead they could see only the faintest shadow-shapes in the blackness, their own eyes wide and black with their night vision. Echoes led them, echoes of a mewl to see what might bounce back to them, echoes of their own claws scraping stone. Vibrations against their whiskers led them, too, as they padded up and up in the velvet dark; up and up through the dense and incomprehensible earth, Kit’s yearning fierce for home, for space and light, for Lucinda and Pedric, for Joe and Dulcie and Misto, for all their human and cat family.

Is this always the way? Kit thought. You long so hard for something, as we longed to see the Netherworld. You reach that place, you dive headfirst into the wonders there, you embrace those who greet you, who take you to their hearts—but then you start to grieve for home and all you left behind, to grieve for those you loved first?

Oh, she thought, will Lucinda and Pedric be home, will they be there to hug and welcome us? Or are they still in Alaska? Will the house be empty and dark, no cheerful blaze on the hearth, no one to hug and snuggle us, no good smells of supper cooking? Are they still there at the top of the world even as we leave the world’s very depths? She imagined Alaska’s mountains of glacial ice breaking and falling, its huge and hungry beasts; she saw the two tiny figures in that vast land which, to Kit, seemed far more threatening than the enchanted realms that they had left behind. Now the last breath of the Netherworld had long ago vanished. The higher they scrambled up through darkness, the deeper up into the vast and heavy earth, the more they longed for the open sky. For their own stars, billions of light-years above them, for the night winds blowing down from heaven, for their own bright moon. Crowded against stone shoulders too close to the edge of dropping chasms, they knew fear: fear of falling, panic sometimes at the tunnel’s confinement, terror that they were lost, but they mustn’t let fear take them. On they climbed, drawn by their terrible longing, up and up, it seemed forever in the overwhelming dark.

Joe and Dulcie bounced along in the back of Ryan’s pickup, slyly peering out. She pulled up before a tall old dark-shingled house that hugged the side of the canyon. Two stories plus a peaked attic and, down at the daylight basement level facing the canyon, a small apartment tucked into the concrete foundation. Even the sight of Ben’s small home brought tears to Dulcie’s eyes and left Joe grim and silent.

Beside the house, the driveway from the street had been widened so one could pull on back next to the little rental. Ryan turned the truck around, backed down against a heavy wooden barrier, and set the brake. Beside Ben’s plain front door, a wide window faced the drive. Through it the cats could see two big cages facing larger windows that looked down the falling canyon. There could be no other windows, the way the apartment was tucked beneath the big house, up against the hill. The inner space looked cramped and dim. Both cats shivered, both cats felt for an instant that in that shadowed room the spirit of Ben might linger, that Ben wasn’t ready yet to leave this earth, to leave his new home, his friends, his little cats. Joe and Dulcie ducked out of sight when Juana’s patrol car pulled down the drive and parked beside them.