Shadowcat



  Shadowcat

  Silja Hare

  Copyright 2012 by Silja Hare

  Watch a cat next time you're outside. Now you see it, sauntering down the sidewalk more real than "real" - and the next moment it crosses a shadow and somehow becomes less than "real". This is because cats live in the Dayworld - we see them all around us but we don't see all they are. We don't see the shadowcats.

  Shadowcats live in the Betweentime, the border between asleep and awake, the line between an object and its reflection in a mirror. Think of setting your hand flat on a mirror - just so is a cat and its Shadowcat counterpart. Cats patrol the streets, yards, and homes of the Dayworld - Shadowcats patrol the darkness at night, ever vigilant against Dreamrats and other "somnivores", those who consume dreams and leave nothing but waste. Just like their Dayworld counterparts, Shadowcats are swift, strong, and merciless.

  Sometimes, though, even a Shadowcat can end up biting off more than she can chew.

  This Shadowcat is young - a kitten, really, for the room She patrolled held not much more than a change table and a bassinet. The dreams of the newborn are unformed and vague - the most the Shadowcat (for they do not have names, always knowing who they are) was required to do was purr when the little mite, left alone in his swaddling, fussed from loneliness or fear.

  "He's an angel," the grandmother pronounced. "Why, you didn't sleep this easily at night until you were nearly two years old!"

  "Do you think he's okay, though," worried the new mother, "He's so very quiet I sometimes fear the worst. I can't sleep at night for checking on him every fifteen minutes."

  Shadowcat opened her moonlight eyes one night to find the bassinet gone and, in its place, a crib gleaming white in the dark. The little one was sitting up in the middle of the cavernous mattress, clearly disturbed. The Shadowcat glided along the walls until She stopped next to the crib, just at the top rail, then closed and opened her kitten-large eyes in a gentle blink. The baby regarded her solemnly for a moment, then removed his fist from his drooling mouth and laughed. Shadowcat blinked again and again the baby laughed. He leaned forward and clumsily pulled himself up to a stand and reached for the cat. Shadowcat rubbed herself under his hand and he laughed again to feel the smoky silk of living shadow.

  The lights flared on and Dad said "What is going on -- honey, get in here! He's standing! He's standing up by himself!" but, of course, the baby had landed on his bottom and was crying lustily from fright and bitter disappointment by the time Mom arrived.

  The crib became a toddler bed shaped like a red race car and that's when the Dreammice made their inital foray and Shadowcat woke to her true purpose. Each Dreammouse she killed, she ate and grew stronger and larger.

  Dreamrats came with the Big Boy bed. He hadn't wanted to give up his racing car bed even if it was too small with his feet hanging off the end and his head getting bumped all the time. Even worse, they had asked him what he wanted and when he said he wanted the blue bunk bed, they said no and got him a "Captain's Bed" with drawers under it. It was brown. It didn't come from the store, either - it came from one of his uncles. It was ugly and that particular uncle gave him a bad feeling in his stomach. He hated the bed and he hated the uncle, so there were a lot of Dreamrats - Shadowcat grew very quickly.

  One night, Shadowcat was restless and irritable. She prowled the boy's room restlessly, tail lashing and eyes glowing an intense yellow. Something was wrong in the house - the very walls vibrated "Danger!". The moon was up when the door to the bedroom eased slowly open. The man who came through and quietly closed the door behind him was nobody the Shadowcat had ever seen before and She was certain he had no business being in the boy's room in the middle of the night.

  The man stood just inside the door and stared at the bed broadcasting a complex range of emotions - fear, guilt, anticipation, shame, all messed up into one roiling mix. Finally, determination took over and he stepped slowly toward the bed - in the moonlight cast on the wall, his shadow reared up, the largest rat the Shadowcat had ever seen and certainly far more than She could handle on her own! Shadowcat knew this man had committed many evil acts for his shadow to have such size and power but She would never let him add her boy to his list of victims!

  She opened her mouth and let out the most horrible screech, half fear, half battle cry! The sound, unheard by man and boy, vibrated the structure of the house and reached far beyond. The man was close to the boy now, close enough to reach out and touch him. His hand stretched forth but drew back instinctively as the Shadowcat desperately launched herself from the wall to fling herself across the child's blanket, all the while issuing her battle call.

  They came.

  Through the window, through the cracks around the doors, from underneath the baseboards and between floorboards, came Shadowcats of all sizes. The man jerked nervously as the curtains in the window billowed even though there was no wind to be felt. The flood of cats poured in from all corners of the rooms and flowed over the giant rat, tearing and clawing away huge chunks of darkness. As the rat's strength dwindled, the man lost his nerve until, as the last of the giant Dreamrat was consumed by a Shadowcat now the size of a tiger, he fled the room. He spent the rest of the night fleeing packs of tigers that chased him through a jungle until he broke free only to run off a tall cliff overlooking sea-lashed rocks below. Again and again, he jerked awake, bathed in cold sweat.

  The next morning, he told his sister and her husband he wasn't feeling well and needed to cut his visit short. He drove home to his second-floor walkup to discover there was nothing to eat - for some reason, he really wanted a tuna sub. The sub shop was near his home - too near to bother driving, really - so he set off down the sidewalk. Almost at once, he encountered one of the many cats that roamed the city streets, a battle-scarred tom, orange tabby with one eye. Usually the man and the cats ignored each other but this time, Tom exposed the full length of his teeth, pinned his ears sharply back, and growled loudly at him, culminating in a violent hissing spit. This drew the attention of an elderly Japanese man wielding a broom in front of the tiny shop he held on the building's ground floor.

  "Good morning," the man greeted him. He was Mister Miyamoto, the local Japanese herbalist. Uncharacteristically, Mister Miyamoto did not return the greeting with a smiling, head-bobbing, "Hai! Hai!". Instead, he watched the man pass with hooded eyes and a face carved in stone, holding the broom lightly balanced in a practiced grip - almost, the man could believe he was looking at a genuine samurai warrior. From a fire escape overhead, a black and white cat hissed and turned to run in through an open window.

  Almost at the sub shop, the man bumped into a black woman wearing a brightly-patterned moumou and turban chatting away animatedly on a crystal-encrusted iPhone, her hands adorned with three inch nails painted purple and gold. The moment he touched her, she leaped back as though he'd shocked her. She stared at him and the colour drained from her face, leaving it with a pasty grey tinge. Backing away, she turned to hurry off in the opposite direction, casting frightened looks back over her shoulder. The man stared at her, completely bewildered, then nearly fell over a grey tabby right in front of him who was glaring evilly, tail bushed out and back arched. Two quick slashes at his shin had the man hopping and shaking his fist at the fleeing animal.

  "Yes, we all have shadows. There's yours and here's mine." An English accent flavoured the world-reknowned voice of a mother with a child that was far too smart for her own good.

  "Not everybody has a shadow," the girl said haughtily.

  "Yes, we do. Everyone in the world has a shadow, no exceptions," the mother replied firmly.

  "'E doesn't," the little girl replied triumphantly. The man turned to see her pointing at his feet. Looking
down, it was true!

  "Are you a ghost, then?" she demanded and he had no idea what to tell her.

  "For heaven's sakes, child, where are your manners! I'm so very sorry," the mother said to him and hurried off, dragging her child along.

  "But you saw! 'E's got no shadow! Why has he got no shadow? Is he a ghost? Why is a ghost at a sandwich shop? Is 'e hungry, then? Where's it to go if 'e's a ghost what 'as no shadow?"

  The man stood for a while then, since he was still hungry, went in and bought a sub - tuna, no veggies, extra mayo. And a drink - "Milk, please". Would he like to add a bag of chips or two cookies and make it a combo? What the heck, it's only an extra buck. He left the shop, dinner in hand, and almost immediately was nearly run over by a cabbie when a cat darted between his ankles as he stepped off the curb, fouling his feet and sending him stumbling into traffic. Glaring wildly at a white tail whisking out of sight behind a concrete planter, he decided that he loathed cats and determined to give the very next one a solid kicking.

  At home, he sat in front of his computer in his boxers, curtains drawn and blinds down tightly, and ate his sub while he watched his favourite videos of innocence being defiled. Although he made lavish use of the "pause" and "rewind" and "zoom" features, the familiar queasy glow failed to appear. He looked down at his lap and nope, no tent. Never mind, he assured himself, it happens to everybody at least once... yet the platitude failed to console and it didn't explain the curious emptiness he felt inside. Every so often, he googled variations on "Why do I have no shadow?" or "Why is my shadow missing?" but couldn't get past the endless "Twilight" links.

  His sub had a shadow, though - that was first disconcerting, then peculiarly fascinating, watching the shadows of his sub, his drink, and his cookies float up and down and gradually disappear as he consumed them. It was hot and stuffy so he finally shut the computer down, threw open the window, and stood there in his underwear hoping for the slightest of breezes. He looked out over the neighbourhood - it seemed darker than usual, he thought. He didn't notice the constellations of double glows congregating on rooftops, window sills, and the pavement around his building. Finally, he threw himself onto his bed and drifted off.

  The moon was at her zenith when the first cat slithered through the open window, oozing down from the sill to the floor. On silent feet,it leaped from the floor to land on the end of the bed with barely a dent in the mattress. The next cat came through, followed by a third, and then two more and more after them. It wasn't long before the man was surrounded by a sea of glowing eyes and lashing tails - and then the window was nearly blotted out by a massive cat, long-haired and white-maned, with giant eyes of liquid gold. A path opened up from the window to the bed and the cat dropped heavily to the floor and proceeded majestically to the bed. The man woke up to discover twenty-five pounds of Maine Coone standing directly on his solar plexus.

  His eyes met the inimical intelligence in the cat's semi-feral gaze and he froze. The cat hissed at him, the sound echoing around and filling the room, echoing louder and louder - too loud! His bulging eyes took in the serried ranks of cats, more cats than he could believe even existed in the world: on his bed, on the floor, on the table, the shelves, the dressers, everywhere he looked were more cats. His attention was drawn to the walls - the shadows - they didn't line up: shadows were moving along the walls, cats sitting, and cats lying down, cats switching tails, and cats grooming ears but no cat in the room so much as moved a whisker!

  As one, the cats howled and the sea of fang and claw closed over him.

  Shadowcat watched from the top of the wall with semi-closed eyes and purred. Across town, the black woman in the brightly-patterned moumou and turban blew the flame out on a guttering candle, black eyes glittering triumphantly as she caressed between the ears of a black cat large enough to look like a miniature panther. On the main floor of the building, Mister Miyamoto saw the little black and white cat outside his window and, placing palms together and touching them to his forehead, bowed reverently. At the other end of town, a sleeping little boy smiled, his dreams full of innocence and free of terror.