It
was Beast’s going away party. We were giving him a good send off in The Cricketer’s,
or at least trying to. Things had unfortunately got a bit out of hand, probably
because of Beast’s decision to lay on a few free churns of fermented milk. As a consequence, most
of the felines present were in their cups, sloshing around pints of Friesian
Export. There’d already been a stand off between two Tomcats over a female in
heat, which had meant the security dog asking them both to leave. And now one
of the cats, a member of the Caterati called Fungus, was on the bar itself, singing,
or at least attempting to.
A
few other cats were dangling from the curtains or curtain poles, bodies
contorted as they balanced both themselves and their pints of the white stuff. The
poor St Bernard’s Lily in the corner of the room had been appropriated as a toilet
and seemed to be wilting as a result. And one feline was up in a light
fitting on the wall, cosily curled around the bulb’s warmth, oblivious to
the fact that its fur was beginning to smoulder.
‘I’m
really sorry you’re going, Beast,’ I vaguely remember saying. I'm not exactly sure when; perhaps we’d
been talking for a while. You shouldn’t really rely on my unreliable narration. In any
case, we were tucked away in a dark and quiet corner, trying to ignore the
madness around us.
‘You
should come too…,’ Beast replied, his pupils large in the gloom.
‘Come
too? Me?’ I asked in disbelief. Primarily because I hadn’t considered this as
an option.
‘Yes.
Come with me! Why not? Leave your Human Slaves behind,’ he urged.
‘I
can’t. And besides, I have too much to do.’
This
wasn’t some lame excuse, but the truth. My novel Shadow Murder had broken
all records and I was writing a sequel, called, at that point in time Shadow
Murder 2. As many of you know, this became Diamond Claw, and what follows gives
some insight into why. Anyway, I’d managed to procure an agent through the
success of Shadow Murder, and he’d been encouraging me to do all kinds of
literary things, some of which were out of my comfort zone. I don’t mean
anything weird, just having to spend time travelling the portals, doing readings
and interviews and so on - the front end of my craft, which allows me to spend
the rest of the time hermit-like, curled up in the top of the house with my
typewriter, dreaming up stories.
‘Mr
Big time, eh?’ said Beast, with a somewhat uncharacteristic snarl, baring his
chipped incisors. Thankfully this aggressive expression broke into one of irony,
the more characteristic Beast reappearing. ‘Well, never mind. No harm in asking,
is there,’ he said, taking a draught, then pawing the milk away from his
whiskers.
‘To
tell you the truth, I’m not sure I’d have the bottle for it,’ I replied. ‘I’m
sure I’d be more of a hindrance. I’m useless at jumping, for example. I haven’t
caught my own food in years. At least, not in anger, not without invoking The
Architect.’
Beast
thought about this before replying. ‘Maybe you're right. We each have our
places in these worlds. Yours is staying at home in Bournemouth, writing all those stories. I couldn’t do that – I don’t have the stamina to sit down and
write for hours like you do.’
‘Do
you think you’ll ever come back?’ I asked, my ears flicking backwards because
of the awful racket Fungus was making.
‘Who
knows? That’s what I’m going to find out. Maybe if I do, you can write about
it.’
Fungus
chose at this point to fall over, sending an avalanche of vitric receptacles
careening down the wooden bar top. The sound of shattering glass seemed to
resonate around the place for a while. And it was at this point that the Mice
Police arrived.
The
Mice in this world, in this verse of space, or whatever you wish to call it,
are somewhat different from what you know in your human frame of reference. For
a start, they are heavily armed. You could say quite ridiculously so. And,
whilst still smaller than a cat, they are larger than a human might expect a
mouse to be. Much of this is down to their enhanced musculature and cybernetic
skeleton. But the rare unenhanced versions I’ve had the pleasure of meeting
aren’t much smaller. And another thing – they absolutely detest us. So you can
imagine what happened when four of the heavily armed Mice Police came in to restore
order.
Now,
cats are good at bolting. Most got out of there before the shots went off. Before
trigger happy Officer Vasman got a bit busy with his new toy. A few old lags,
high on the effects of the white stuff and god knows what else, decided to have
it out with the MPs. Which went down like a pile of excrement, and not one
which had been delicately covered by soil to preserve one’s dignity. When the
MPs had finished with those lags, they weren’t even fit for taxidermy – they
were laced with so many holes that the stuffing would fall straight out.
Beast
and I dashed across the streets of Brighton, the other cats scattering into the
darkness. Behind us the report of another of Vasman’s rounds rang out. We
plunged past the bars and restaurants, shimmering with the ghosts of human
existence, and then into the maze of the lanes. I trailed behind Beast, as we twisted
and turned through the serried ranks of second hand book shops, record stores,
antiques centres and artisan boutiques. I noticed that Shadow Murder was for
sale in the windowfront of one as we skipped past, but didn’t stop to look.
Beast
slowed and drew to a halt in the North Lanes, where the metageography of our world and
that usually occupied by humans begins to diverge. Where their shops and
restaurants exist, in our world this part of the town has fallen into abeyance.
Some areas are similar, limned by the smokelike impression of the other, but
most are ramshackle, fallen to ruin. Within this mess of fallen masonry lay the
mystic path: the ancient portal which wound a unique course through the
multiverse in the heart of the old lanes. Nobody knew where it went, and it was
said that no-one who had used it had ever returned. It lay at the back of a
building which in human space was a flea market, so around us shimmered the
ghostly outline of human detritus, cast offs: some worthless, some priceless.
‘Here
it is, the so-called path of the Mystics.’
‘But…
You are going now?’ I asked, out of breath after the sprint.
‘Well,
seems like a good time. The party’s over, after all.’
‘I
just… didn’t imagine it would be so quick. I thought maybe you’d hang around for
a few days, say goodbye to everyone properly.’
‘I’ve
said my goodbyes. And this is my final one,’ he said, holding out a paw.
Somewhat
stunned, I paused for a moment. One of his claws had been replaced by a curved
shard of diamond, which jutted out slightly. He’d told me about this once, how
he’d lost the claw in a fight, and how it hadn’t grown back - which had
necessitated the implant which now glinted at me in the night. I found myself
suddenly wondering about the stories he held which he hadn’t given up so
easily. And the stories which I would no longer hear repeated after the third
pint.
I
held out mine in return and our paw pads touched.
‘I’ll
look for you in the shadows, in the space beyond,’ I said.
‘And
if I see you, I’ll say hi,’ Beast replied.
‘You
really aren’t coming back are you?’ I asked, doleful.
Beast
cocked his head, looked at me with eyes half closed. ‘Look, your books are
going well. But sooner or later, you’re going to need some new material aren’t
you? And when that happens, I’ll find you.’
And
then he turned on his pads, and into the dark space beyond. For a moment, the
human world seemed to bleed in strongly, and his outline was lost behind a blur
of old Star Wars toys and OO gauge railway models. I squinted into the dark, thought
I saw him once more: a speck of grey against the blackened bones of the
building, but then he was gone.
As
I turned back, my paws felt heavy, leaden. I started nosing my way to one of
the conventional portals in the town, but couldn’t concentrate, and kept losing
myself in the web of streets. As I wondered if I would ever see my friend
again, I felt a wave of melancholy flow over me. Eventually I found myself walking
past the onions of the Pavilion, the gardens of which were now filled with the
casualties of the night, the outcasts from the pubs and Nepeta dens.
Just
as I began to wonder about the likelihood of Officer Vasman appearing again, I
heard the sound of gunfire. I looked around, panicking.
‘Quick,
this way,’ something whispered: a voice familiar to me. I caught the shadow of
a cat and sprinted after it. I followed its tail as it swished through the
streets, the sensation oddly similar to that an hour or so earlier. And then I
was back in the place it had all started that evening: the alleyway next to The
Cricketers’.
I
had a strong feeling that it had to have been him, that some tendrils of the
space he now inhabited were leaching out to mine. I looked around, but the tail
had now gone. However, the melancholy I’d felt earlier had also vanished, as if
it too had passed into a separate portal. And I became convinced, although I’m
not sure why, that I’d see my friend again.
I
turned to the metaverse and spoke: ‘Thanks, Beast.’ And then I stepped through
the portal, back home to where I would spin new worlds of my own into existence.
Fashioning portals from the words, which I hope have just transported you there
and back again.
END
This may be the best yet in the Caturday series!
ReplyDeleteI'm not even sure why - it just - ROCKS!
The gunfire, the familiar voice (Quick, this way) - there's so much going on here, and I love it all.