Night Freight

Tom

Decker was so absorbed in the collection of Fredric Brown stories he was reading that he didn't see the cat jump onto the balcony railing. He felt its presence after a while, and when he glanced up there it was, switching its tail and staring at him.

At first he was startled; it was as if the cat had materialized out of nowhere. Then he felt a small pleasure. Except for birds and two deer running in the woods, it was the first living creature he'd seen in two weeks. Not that he minded the solitude here; it was the main reason he'd come to this northern California wilderness—a welcome change from his high-pressure Silicon Valley computer job, and a chance to work uninterrupted on the novel he was trying to write. But after fourteen days he was ready for a little company, even if it was only a stray tomcat.

He closed the well-worn paperback and returned the cat's stare. "Well," he said, "hello there, Tom. Where'd you come from?"

The cat didn't move except for its switching tail. Continued to watch him with eyes that were an odd luminous yellow. Otherwise it was an ordinary Felis catus, a big butterscotch male with the unneutered tom's overlarge head. It might have been anywhere from three to ten years old.

A minute or so passed—and Decker's feeling of pleasure passed with it. There was something strange about those steady unblinking eyes, something in their depths that might have been malice . . .

No, that was silly. A product of his hyperactive imagination, nurtured for nearly twenty years now by a steady diet of mystery and horror fiction, his one passion other than microtechnology. A product too, he thought, of the coincidental fact that the cat's sudden appearance had coincided with his reading of a Brown story called "Ailurophobe," which was about a man who had a morbid fear of cats.

He had no such fear; at least he'd never been afraid of cats before today. And yet . . . those funny luminous eyes. He had never encountered a cat quite like this one before today.

His mind conjured up another Brown story he'd read, about an alien intelligence that had come to Earth and taken over the body of the protagonist's pet cat.

Then, in spite of himself, he remembered a succession of other stories by other writers about cats who were demons and sorcerers, about human beings who were werecats.

Decker suppressed a shiver. Shook himself and smiled a little sheepishly. "Come on," he said aloud, "that's all pure fantasy. Cats are just cats."

He got up and crossed to the railing. The torn seemed to tense without actually moving. Decker said, "So, guy, what're you doing way out here in the piney woods?" and reached out a hand to pat the animal's head.

Before he could touch it, the cat leaped gracefully to the floor and ran through the open doors into the cabin. He blinked after it for a few seconds, then followed it inside. Where he found it sitting on one arm of the wicker settee, flicking its tail and staring at him again.

For a reason he couldn't explain, Decker began to feel apprehensive. "Hell," he said, "what's the matter with me? Tom, you're nothing to be afraid of."

The apprehension did not go away. Neither did the cat. When Decker walked deliberately to the settee, with the intention of either shooing or carrying the tom outside, it bounded off again. Took up another watchful position on top of a battered old bookcase.

"All right now," Decker said, "what's the idea? You want something, is that it? You hungry, maybe?"

The fur along the cat's back rippled. Otherwise it sat motionless.

Decker nodded. "Sure, that must be it. Big old tom like you, you need plenty of fuel. If I give you something to eat, you'll go away and let me get back to my reading."

He went into the kitchen, poured a little milk into a dish, tore two small strips of white meat from a leftover Swanson's chicken breast, and took the food back into the living room. He put it down on the floor near the bookcase, backed off half a dozen paces.

The cat did not move.

"Well, go ahead," Decker said. "Eat it and get out."

Ten seconds died away. Then the tom jumped off the bookcase, walked past the food without pausing even to sniff it, and sat down again in the bedroom doorway.

Okay, Decker thought uneasily, so you're not hungry. What else could you want?

He made an effort to recall what he knew about cats. Well, he knew they had been considered sacred by the ancient Egyptians, who worshiped them in temples, paraded them on feast days, embalmed and mummified them when they died and then buried them in holy ground. And that the Egyptian goddess Bast had supposedly endowed them with semidivine powers.

He knew that in the Middle Ages they had been linked to the Devil and the practice of Black Arts and were burned and tortured in religion-sanctioned witch hunts.

He knew that Henry James (whom he had read in college) once said about them: "Cats and monkeys, monkeys and cats—all human life is there."

He knew that they were predators with a streak of cruelty: they liked to toy with their prey before devouring it.

And he knew they were independent, selfish, aloof, patient, cunning, mischievous, extra clean, and purred when they were contented.

In short, his knowledge was limited, fragmentary, and mostly trivial. And none of it offered a clue to this cat's presence or behavior.

"The hell with it," he said. "This has gone far enough. Tom, you're trespassing. Out you go, right now."

He advanced on the cat, slowly so as not to frighten it. It let him get within two steps, then darted away again. Decker went after it—and went after it, and went after it. It avoided him effortlessly, gliding from one point in the room to another without once taking its yellow-bright gaze from him.

After several minutes, winded and vaguely frightened himself, he gave up the chase. "Damn you," he said, "what do you want here?"

The tom stared, switching its tail.

Decker's imagination began to soar again. All sorts of fantastic explanations occurred to him. Suppose the cat was Satan in disguise, come after his soul? Suppose, as in George Langelaan's story "The Fly," a scientist somewhere had been experimenting with a matter transporter and a cat had gotten inside with an evil human subject? Suppose the tom was a kind of modem-day Medusa: look at it long enough and it drives you mad? Suppose—

The cat jumped off the couch and started toward him.

Decker felt a sharp surge of fear. Rigid with it, he watched the animal come to within a few feet and then sit again and glare up at him. Incoming sunlight reflected in its yellow eyes created an illusion of depth and flame that was almost hypnotic.

Compulsively, Decker turned and ran out of the room and slammed the door behind him.

In the kitchen he picked up the telephone—and immediately put it down again. Who was he going to call? The county sheriff's office? "I've got a strange cat in my rented cabin and I can't get rid of it. Can you send somebody right out?" Good Christ, they'd laugh themselves sick.

Decker poured a glass of red wine and tried to get a grip on himself. I'm not an ailurophobe, he thought, and I'm not paranoid or delusional, and I'm not—nice irony for you—a 'fraidy cat. Cats are just cats, damn it. So why am I letting this one upset me this way?

The wine calmed him, made him feel sheepish again. He went back into the living room.

The cat wasn't there.

He looked in the bedroom and the bathroom, the cabin's only other rooms. No cat. Gone, then. Grew tired of whatever game it had been playing, ran off through the balcony doors and back into the woods.

That made him feel even better—more relieved, he admitted to himself, than the situation warranted. He shut and locked the balcony doors, took the Fred Brown paperback to the couch, and tried to resume reading.

He couldn't concentrate. It was hot in the cabin with the doors and windows shut, and the cat was still on his mind. He decided to have another glass of wine. Maybe that would mellow him enough to restore his mental equilibrium, even get his creative juices flowing. He hadn't done as much work on his novel in the past two weeks as he'd planned.

He poured the wine, drank half of it in the kitchen. Took the rest into the bedroom, where he'd set up his Macintosh laptop.

The tomcat was sitting in the middle of the bed. Fear and disbelief made Decker drop the glass; wine like blood spatters glistened across the redwood flooring. "How the hell did you get in here?" he shouted.

Switch. Switch.

He lunged at the bed, but the cat leapt down easily and raced out of the room. Decker ran after it, saw it dart into the kitchen. He ran in there—and the cat had vanished again. He searched the room, couldn't find it. Back to the living room. No cat. Bedroom, bathroom. No cat.

Fine, dandy, except for one thing. All the doors and windows were still tightly shut. The tom couldn't have gotten out; it had to still be inside the cabin.

Shaken, Decker stood looking around, listening to the silence. How had the cat gotten back inside in the first place? Where was it hiding?

What did it want from him?

He tried to tell himself again that he was overreacting. But he didn't believe it. His terror was real and so was the lingering aura of menace the torn had brought with it.

I've got to find it, he thought grimly. Find it and get rid of it once and for all.

Bedroom. Nightstand drawer. His .32 revolver.

Decker had never shot anything with the gun, for sport or otherwise; he'd only brought it along for security, since his nearest neighbor was half a mile away and the nearest town was another four miles beyond there. But he knew he would shoot the cat when he found it, irrational act or not. Just as he would have shot a human intruder who threatened him.

Once more he searched the cabin, forcing himself to do it slowly and methodically. He looked under and behind the furniture, inside the closets, under the sink, through cartons—every conceivable hiding place.

There was no sign of the tom.

His mouth and throat were sand-dry; he had to drink three glasses of water to ease the parching. The thought occurred to him then that he hadn't found the cat because the cat didn't exist; that it was a figment of his hyperactive imagination induced by the Brown story. Hallucination, paranoid obsession . . . maybe he was paranoid and delusional after all.

"Crap," he said aloud. "The damned cat's real."

He turned from the sink—and the cat was sitting on the kitchen table, glowing yellow eyes fixed on him, tail switching.

Decker made an involuntary sound, threw up his arm, and tried to aim the .32, but the arm shook so badly that he had to brace the gun with his free hand. The cat kept on staring at him. Except for the rhythmic flicks of its tail, it was as still as death.

His finger tightened on the trigger.

Switch.

And sudden doubts assailed him. What if the cat had telekinetic powers, and when he fired, it turned the bullet back at him? What if the cat was some monstrous freak of nature, endowed with superpowers, and before he could fire it willed him out of existence?

Supercat, he thought. Jesus, I am going crazy!

He pulled the trigger.

Nothing happened; the gun didn't fire.

The cat jumped down off the table, came toward him—not as it had earlier, but as if with a purpose.

Frantically Decker squeezed the trigger again, and again, and still the revolver failed to fire. The tom continued its advance. Decker backed away in terror, came up against the wall, then hurled the weapon at the cat, straight at the cat. It should have struck the cat squarely in the head, only at the last second it seemed to loop around the tom's head like a sharp-breaking curveball—

Vertigo seized him. The room began to spin, slowly, then rapidly, and there was a gray mist in front of his eyes. He felt himself starting to fall, shut his eyes, put out his hands to the wall in an effort to brace his body—

—and the wall wasn't there—

—and he kept right on falling . . .

Decker opened his eyes. He was lying on a floor, only it was not the floor of his rented kitchen; it was the floor of a gray place, a place without furnishings or definition, a place where the gray mist floated and shimmied and everything—walls, floor, ceiling—was distorted, surreal.

A nonplace. A cat place?

Something made a noise nearby. A cat sound unlike any he had ever heard or could have imagined—a shrill mewling roar.

Decker jerked his head around. And the tom was there, the tom filled the nonplace as if it had grown to human size while he had been shrunk to feline dimensions. It loomed over him, its tail switching, its whiskers quivering. When he saw it like that he tried to stand and run . . . and it reached out one massive paw, almost lazily, and brought it down on his chest, pinned him to the floor. Its jaws opened wide, and he was looking up then into the wet cavern of its mouth, at the rows of sharp white spikes that gleamed there.

Cats are predators with a streak of cruelly: they like to toy with their prey before devouring it.

"No!"

Big old tom like you, you need plenty of fuel.

Decker opened his mouth to scream again, but all that came out was a mouselike squeak.

And then it was feeding time. . . .