Читать онлайн «Cat Telling Tales»

1

The tomcat didn’t believe in prophetic dreams, he didn’t believe in insightful visions of future events or past events or whatever the hell that was that woke him yowling and clawing at the cushions with sweaty paws. It was the middle of the night, the sky outside the windows was clearer than the glass itself, the stars hung high and bright in their universe; the cool night was tucked around him as if to say that all was good, all was right with the world.

But he’d awakened frantic, still caught in the violent storm of his dreams; black wind driving rain at him so real that, rising up, he licked his paw expecting it to be sopping wet, expecting to have to lick himself dry all over.

That was a dream? What the hell was that?

He didn’t mind lifelike dreams of, say, a rollicking hunt with his tabby lady, feasting on rats and gophers, happy dream-memories that did nothing more than enrich his restful sleep. What he didn’t need was this kind of storm-filled nightmare so real he could still hear the wind howling. Didn’t need this chilling experience of humans he didn’t know, caught up in some violent personal battle, the dream’s aura dark and so damnably loud that his poor cat head pounded and his ears still hurt: rain pelting down hammering a thin roof, two women shouting and screaming at each other with a terrible rage as rain beat against the thin walls of their little wooden shack, both women’s anger elemental, irreconcilable.

Even in the stormy dark, he’d somehow known the shack stood beside a low hill that was flattened off at the top, a fence running along up there. That a small grove of trees stood below, some distance from the shack, sturdy saplings bent nearly double by the driving wind. He had a sense of several cats crouched at the base of the trees, terrified and shivering. Rain drove like hammers against the cottage, its drumming mixed with the women’s shouts, and then he was inside the shack itself, the air cold and stinking of onions fried in rancid fat. A thin greasy light from a bare, overhead lightbulb, only a hint of warmth seeping from a square metal heater, the smell of butane fumes. An old woman, kinky gray hair, her wrinkled face screwed up with rage. The young woman slender, maybe in her twenties, her oval face flushed with anger, dark hair, long and wet and tangled, her brown eyes huge with vengeance. He could see a cot in the far corner, a child curled up beneath thin blankets into a miserable ball like a little animal, hugging himself against the women’s rage.