Spares - Michael Marshall Smith [89]
“Heard a hundred stories on the first day,” he said irritably. “Didn’t listen to any of them.”
I nodded. “I heard a few, too, but only one that ever seemed to make any sense.” The cat was ambling around the bases of the trees now, going about cat business, whatever that may be.
“Is this going to be more hippie bullshit?”
“A guy was watching his cat one day,” I continued, ignoring him. “Nowhere near here—out on the West Coast somewhere, and maybe the original guy was some kind of space cadet. Anyway,” I said, pulling my spike out of my jacket pocket and laying it on the dashboard. “This guy spends a lot of time watching the cat, and realizes one of life’s great truths.”
“What was that?” Vinaldi eyed the needle on the dash with suspicion. I opened the two packets of foil, laying them out carefully on the screen of the Positionex.
“A cat’s always on the wrong side of a door,” I said. “You don’t let it out of the house, then outside’s exactly where it wants to be—until you do let it out, when it suddenly needs to be back inside again. You keep it indoors, it always wants to be inside the cupboards—until you shut it in one, when it suddenly wants to come out again. You put a cat down anywhere on the earth, and it’s going to go looking for somewhere else to be.”
I glanced outside to see that Ghuaji was still motionless, and that the cat had worked its way round to the far end of the compound, still sniffing, still looking around. Then I lifted the bottle of Jack’s from the floor and poured a little into the cap of the bottle. I put the tip of my finger into the whiskey and carefully carried the drop of liquid over to one of the foils. I repeated this with the other foil and then watched as the two small piles of Rapt deliquesced. Within seconds there were two pools of concentrated liquid, sitting like mercury on the foil.
“This guy thinks about this for a while, and wonders what the fuck the cat is looking for. He gets the idea in his head that there’s some final door somewhere, and all cats are searching for it. So one day, when he’s stoned and has nothing better to do, he lets the cat out and decides to follow it. First thing the cat does, of course, is come straight back in again. Naturally. It’s a cat. Then after a while it goes back outside, and wanders out into the yard. And this yard, okay, backs out onto a forest, and the cat is used to trailing around out there. So the guy follows it, at a distance, and watches while it does what it normally does.”
“I think Ghuaji’s dead,” Vinaldi said.
“No, he isn’t,” I said. “Now listen. There isn’t much more. This guy follows the cat all day as it tromps round the forest.”
“Must have been good dope he was on.”
“He watches the way it goes behind trees, goes into hollows, comes back out again, generally cats around. And then—”
“Something’s happening,” Vinaldi interrupted.
“What?”
“I don’t know. But I saw something.”
“What?”
“I don’t know. That’s why I say something’s happening.”
I hurriedly reached for the hypo, cracked a new needle on, and sucked the drugs up into the barrel. When it was flicked I looked back out the windshield and saw that Vinaldi was probably right. Ghuaji’s head had come back up, though his eyes were still closed. The cat was working its way farther into the trees, still pulling the rope behind it. It was so far away that you couldn’t see it, only the line leading out into the darkness. I’d always believed the story had been true. It made sense, to me at least. Cats have been worshiped, used as familiars, for an awfully long time. There had to be a reason.
Then I heard something. Bark working against itself, branches laughing, moonlight scraping the sky. I looked down out of the window and saw a single leaf running past the truck, over the surface of the snow. It had two stalks and was using them as legs, running from what or to where I would never know.
“Yeah,