The cats pounced. They tore, teeth and savage claws, rending the howling memory limb from limb. When the carping effigy rose from the shreds, they scrimmaged and mangled its head, broke its neck, and raked it to quivering ribbons. Each time, the monster twitched and reassembled. They attacked, over and over again, until they were breathless and battered.
Bouncer was puffing. Chief seemed done in. The harder the cats fought, the more the rain fell. Their mouths burned with the salt-taste of childish tears, and their eyes stung, gritted with the ashes sown by wounding regrets.
Scamper grappled until he was numb. All but drowned by the endless rain, he kicked and raked at the gibbering fragments. No warning prepared him. Suddenly the thought-stuff he wrestled caved in. The firm ground melted under his feet. Then the dream realm around him dissolved and ran molten, hurling him toward oblivion.
“Let go!” yelled the Chief. “That’s the hole for your entry!”
Soaked, beyond miserable, Scamper scrabbled at air. He could not control his plummeting fall. Twisting, he tumbled out of the dream realm, unable to salve his wrecked dignity.
The Chiefs cry of encouragement dimmed, lost in the maelstrom now rapidly disappearing behind. “Copper! You have to land on your feet! Keep your wits, Scamp! We’ll keep holding the line in the dream realm. But the game that’s afoot in the world is now left entirely up to you!”
Scamper landed on gravel with a spraddle-legged thump. Pelted by a downpour and shaken half out of his feline senses, he yowled with rage and soaked misery.
His caterwaul caused a woman to turn away from her teetering stance at the verge of the tenement roof. She was not old! Young and worn, with a tired slouch to her shoulders, she was as wretchedly soaked as the cat, her eyes red from incessant weeping.
“Meow!” Scamper wailed. No way could he make such a drenched creature laugh! The woman’s dejection blackened the very clouds. No brilliant idea, amid this aching chill, could lift her dark nimbus of misery. Dense thoughts still poured from her presence like ink. Scamper was too distressed to do battle, far less conjure up the feline inspiration to wheedle her down off the roof.
Scamper squalled again, ears flat in frustration. This woman had learned as a child to hate cats! If he set her ranting, or gave her a scare, she might trip off the brink without jumping.
Worst of all, Chief and Bouncer stayed trapped in her dreamscape, fighting her relentless habit of melancholy, unless the drab cycle was broken.
Scamper shrank down. Huddled, dejected, he glanced left and right. But the flat rooftop provided no cranny for even a small cat to hide. He could do nothing but bawl as the human approached step by step and loomed over him.
“A cat? Oh! Poor thing!” Chilled hands reached down. They stroked his wet copper fur, which was repulsively grimy with dirt and machine oil. “You’re shivering! Starving, too. I can feel every rib! Let’s take you inside. Maybe towel you dry and see what I have to feed you…”
Three weeks later, Scamper crouched in Bouncer’s company, companionably crunching on the promised fillets at the back of the Catfish Grill. Chief lounged nearby, licking his chops, when the Maine Coon posed the curious question. “How in feline daylights did you get that woman to revive her forgotten dream?”
Scamper flicked his tail, purring and pleased. “Wasn’t so hard,” he allowed with a wink. “I chased a rat burglar into the back closet where she’d stashed her art paper and paints. When I leaped on the shelf, I kicked over the tin. Went easy, from there. I just chased the dizzy rodent in circles till I’d scattered her brushes and pigments. Oh, she yelled, sure enough, when she found the mess. But cleaning the spilled colors out of her carpet, she had to remember the fun she once had making pictures. Then and there, she got up and called an old friend from school. Now they go out painting together. Could be the start of a romance.”
Scamper spat out a fish fin and chuckled. “Nailed the rat, too.”
“Tasty business,” drawled Chief, who enjoyed a fresh kill.
Scamper laughed outright. “The tail end is the best! The dead rat brought the woman so much delight, she’s now feeding me tuna fish out of the can.”
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Donald J. Bingle has had a wide variety of short fiction published, primarily in DAW themed anthologies but also in tie-in anthologies for the
Dragonlance and Transformers universes and in popular role-playing gaming materials. Recently, he has had stories published in The Dimensions Next Door, Fellowship Fantastic, Front Lines, Imaginary Friends, and Pandora’s Closet. His first novel, Forced Conversion, is set in the near future, when anyone can have heaven, any heaven they want, but some people don’t want to go. His most recent novel, Greensword, is a darkly comedic thriller about a group of environmentalists who decide to end global warming… immediately. Now they’re about to save the world; they just don’t want to get caught doing it. Don can be reached at [email protected], and his novels can be purchased through www.orphyte.com/donaldjbingle
Richard Lee Byers is the author of over thirty fantasy and horror novels, including
Unclean, Undead, The Enemy Within, and Dissolution. His current projects include Unholy (the concluding volume in the “ Haunted Land ” trilogy) and the screenplay for The Plague Knight, a major movie release. A resident of the Tampa Bay area, the setting for much of his horror fiction, he spends much of his leisure time fencing, playing poker, and shooting pool, and is a frequent guest at Florida science-fiction conventions.
Having lived catless for decades, Edward Carmien is now co-owned by two tabbies, one friendly, one skittish, brothers rescued by and adopted from the local pound. After averaging roughly a story a year for almost a dozen years, he is soundly beating that average, and his work can be found most recently in
Black Gate 12 and other places one can discover by Googling his last name. Ed rides motorcycles (ABC #7573), teaches, canoes, avoids yardwork, shoots photos, tries to keep up with his kids, and does sundry other things in Princeton, New Jersey, where the elm tree didn’t quite die out.
Elaine Cunningham spends most of her waking hours reacting to subliminal messages from her two Siamese. She moonlights as a
New York Times bestselling author of twenty-one books and about three dozen short stories. Kirkus Review named Shadows in the Starlight, the second book in her Changeling Detective urban fantasy series, to their list of Top Ten SciFi Books of 2006. (Elaine suspects that the list’s compilers have cats and further suspects that those cats communicate with her Siamese-probably through MySpace.) She is still busily writing fantasy novels and short stories but is also branching out into historical fiction. And her first editorial project, Lilith Undead-an anthology of tales based on the Lilith mythology-was recently published. A former music and history teacher, Elaine now focuses most of her musical energies on the Celtic harp, which is, oddly enough, the only instrument the cats actively enjoy.
Esther M. Friesner is the author of thirty-three novels and over one hundred fifty short stories and other works. She won the Nebula Award twice as well as the Skylark and the Romantic Times Award. Best known for creating and editing the wildly popular
Chicks In Chainmail anthology series (Baen Books), her latest publications are the Young Adult novels Temping Fate, Nobody’s Princess, and Nobody’s Prize. She lives in Connecticut with her husband, is the mother of two grown children, and harbors cats.