The Neighbors’ Cat
Gregory L. Norris
The green one—an old New Englander with peeling white trim and black storm shutters—was that place in every neighborhood neighbors talked about. During my three-plus years living next door to Mike and Linda Talmadge, their notorious flop house had been the epicenter of several police raids—I’m talking guns drawn type—and, once last autumn, by the bigger arms of law enforcement. One of their tenants, it turned out thanks to a tip from another disgruntled flopper, was cooking meth in an upstairs bedroom.
Life in my quiet, sane little house with its postage stamp-size yard, perfect for lazy lawn mowings without the added threat of stroking out beneath the noonday sun, had been a nightmare since they bought the place as a foreclosure at bottom dollar, and then turned it into an endless revolving door of low-lives and desperates.
Even their cat was a menace.
A scrawny, orange tabby with a big head and obvious rib bones, I woke that sunny Sunday morning to find him plastered on the outside screen of my sun porch door, holding on by his nails. The nervy little terror had already plucked several jagged holes in the mesh, creating future entry points for mosquitoes and mayflies. So much for calm nights at sunset spent on my favorite part of the house. Their cat had ruined that for me, too.
I swore, my rosary a blasphemous counterpoint to the dreamy carillon playing from Saint Luke’s on Church Street.
“What’s your problem?” the cat asked, his voice male, from the tenor to baritone range.
“My problem?” I huffed, and then swore again, “Is that you people are a monsoon of crazy. You have no respect for your neighbors and the neighborhood. You’re loud, nasty, filthy—you don’t take care of the place. Hell, even your bedbugs are cleaner and have better manners.”
Then, I realized I was talking to their cat.
I narrowed my gaze on the cat’s eyes, which were all pupil.
“Did you say something?” I asked aloud, feeling foolish. Foolish? After some of the ludicrousy committed on the other side of my single-car driveway, what did I have to worry about? Even if I’d finally cracked after so many years of living alone, at least I’d kept the crazy confined to my side of the property line.
“Yeah,” the cat said, his little mouth moving between pants. “I said, let me in—they’re bananas over there!”
He tipped his chin, indicating my neighbors’ house, where my neighbors’ cat lived.
“Okay, I’m going to lie down now,” I said. St. Luke’s carillon tinkled and tintinnabulated over the neighborhood, the notes drawing out, dragging downward, as I turned. Some unaffected register in my dazed thoughts heard the sharp plink plink as cat nails detached from what had been until that morning perfect door screen, and reattached, tearing fresh holes in the mesh.
“Mister, you gotta help me,” the voice continued. “I don’t got a lot of options.”
“How about Lithium, Thorazine, or catnip,” I said on my way into the house.
I had vague understanding of the fan on the dresser turning, its motor struggling, groaning, as it spun air for what I remembered was its ninth summer—not bad for an appliance purchased on the cheap from a big box store that sourced all of its inventory from China. My heart wasn’t faring as well. I collapsed onto the bed. The bed was catty-corner between the room’s windows. At some untimed point in the cottony-cloud fugue that followed, I heard the cat jump into the window box outside, showing the same lack of care for my royal purple petunias as he had the sun porch door screen.
“Look,” he said.
I rolled over. An orange beast had flattened the flowers. “No, you look.”
“Don’t you sense it, man? The wrongness emanating from that house of horrors?”
I did, and nodded.
“You seem like a jake guy. Not at all like that twisted idiot and his she-devil common-law boozehound of a wife. Help me, that’s all I’m asking.”
“I’m not a cat person,” I said, my head mashed onto the top pillow.
“You’re in luck, because right now I’m as much people as I am cat.”
“I’m not really a people person, either.”
That removed some of the little monster’s moxie. He pretended to sniff around one of the surviving flower trumpets, nipping at the purple velvet petals. “So, you’re not a cat person, and you’re not a people person. But aren’t you at least curious?”
“About?”
“About what’s really going on over there, one house away from your fine, happy home. Let me in, mister—I’m dying out here!”
I shook my head. The growing bald patch rubbed unpleasantly against the pillowcase. “No—you’ve likely got fleas.”
“Fleas?” the cat parroted. “Mister, if you don’t put a stop to it, to what they’re up to, fleas’ll be the least of your worries!”
§
I opened a can of tuna and put it in a bowl, juice and all, along with a glug of two-percent in another. The cat wolfed them down, his purrs juicy and rabid. Soon, both bowls were clean.
“Next?” he asked, and licked his lips.
“What do you mean?”
He eyed the bowls.
“That’s albacore—the good stuff. Expensive.”
“Cry me a river,” the cat said. “You try living on bugs and frogs and the occasional field mouse like me, because the rats you were unlucky enough to wind up with don’t have an ounce of common decency.”
Sighing, I pulled another can of tuna out of the cabinet and cranked it open by hand. The cat’s striped tail snapped in anticipation. I lowered the bowl. He helped himself, this time leaving a few flakes for later enjoyment. When finished, he groomed his face with a paw.
“Now?” I asked.
“And now, we nap.”
“Nap?”
“Still a cat, buddy. But when we wake up…boy, do I have a story for you!”
§
We snuggled together on the bed, one lonely man growing older beyond simple seconds and days, and a scrawny tabby with a moth-eaten orange coat. In lieu of words, the cat purred beside me, the cadence soothing, strangely reassuring. As the afternoon drifted forward at an unhurried pace, I forgot that I didn’t like cats. Half asleep, I scritched his head. The cat leaned into my touch. At one point, he stretched out contentedly, offering his stuffed belly for me to stroke.
“You got a name?” I asked.
“Gunther,” the cat said.
“Really?”
He snorted a sarcastic laugh through his nose, half of it sneezed. “No, but seriously, you people…needing to name everything. Cat. House. Flower. Ancient evil…”
My eyes inched wider open. “Come again?”
The cat stood, stretched his spine, and kicked out his legs, one at a time. “That was the most comfortable catnap I’ve enjoyed since—”
“Gunther,” I admonished.
He glared at me through one eye, the other cloaked behind its third lid. “You sure you’re ready for this before we’ve enjoyed another fine, fine meal?”
“I’m not hungry.”
“Not even for a morsel, a scrap?”
“Elaborate on what you said about ‘ancient evil’.”
The cat’s other eye unstuck. It was all pupil again. “Your neighbors are low-lives, it’s true. Among the lowest of the low. You could say that disgusting house of theirs is where pets go to die. I tried to get out, but when they leave a door open, and there’s rain in the forecast…God, I hate rain!”
“Screw the rain. What kind of ancient evil?”
“You know all those people coming and going, renting floor space in that house?”
I rolled my eyes. “I’m aware.”
“One of them came, went—though not in the manner you’d think. Expired right there in the middle of that dark tabernacle they refer to as a living room. Oh yeah, while you’re in here having your chamomile tea and scones, dreaming your dreamy little dreams, Lord and Lady Talmadge are murdering him because of this book he has, a book of dark magic older than the U-S-of-A. Then, they’re out back digging a shallow grave by the light of the moon, and dumping the corpse of that dead slob in it.”
I listened, forgetting to breathe until the last bottled sip of air began to boil in my lungs. Forgot blinking, too—I imagined my eyes were all pupil as well, like the cat’s. “They buried his body in their backyard?”
Gunther fixed me with a look. “Oh, it gets better, friend. And it gets worse. Much worse. You see, while they were forgetting to feed me and I was out foraging for Kobe rat and salamander tartare, I seen it.”
“It?”
“The body. Only it wasn’t dead no more. Dug its way out of the dirt and dragged itself back in there.”
“Maybe he wasn’t really dead,” I said. “Just stunned.”
Gunther scratched at his jowls with a hind foot. Fleas—I knew it!
“Oh, he was dead, chum. Still is. You see, everyone’s favorite neighbors, Ole Mikey and that pillar of virtue Linda, they opened that book and brought the stiff back from the dead using one of the spells inside. Consider necromancy just another of their nastier habits, like smoking crack and getting hammered by nine in the morning. They’re not very good at this stuff, mind you. And you know that old chestnut, the one about a little knowledge being dangerous? Blah, blah, blah, in the wrong hands, with idiots? That’s them. That’s what you’re up against. A couple of loony dirt bags, who are likely, even as we speak, tampering with dark forces best left alone.”
§
I closed the bathroom door and sat. Gunther scratched at the outside. When that failed to grant him entrance, he passed several clawed front toes under the frame, making grabs at air.
“Come on, let me in,” he begged.
“Why? Why do cats always want to follow you into the john?”
“That’s just how we roll, kemosabe. Would you prefer to have this conversation in this seedy fashion, or can we do it face to face?”
Sighing, I flushed, dragged up my pants, and opened the door. Gunther streaked in. When I exited, he followed.
‘So, do you believe me?”
“About the evil goings-on next door?”
“Yeah, yeah,” the cat said.
I poured a cold one—tap water. I might have opted for something stronger, but I wasn’t like my neighbors, to whom it was always beer o’clock. “I do,” I said. “That we’re having this little chat at all proves just how frigged life has become as a result of living next door to them.”
He told me about the spell that had given him the power of human speech, which had left one of the undesirables in the green house, a man named Kenneth, yowling like a cat in heat.
“Another of their botched experiments. I think I was supposed to be sacrificed.”
I caught the note of sadness in Gunther’s voice and felt sorry for him. Reaching down, I stroked the cat’s spine. Gunther chirped and arched his back into my palm.
“I really hate those people,” I said.
Gunther purred.
“Now, about this dead man?”
“The sun’s almost down,” the cat said. “Come on, I’ll show you.”
§
Creeping around other people’s houses and peering in through windows was more their style. I was raised by strict parents who taught me to respect rules and boundaries. It didn’t matter that it was Mike and Linda, or that I was seeking proof of the danger those two dirt bags were putting themselves and others in through their tampering with sinister cosmic powers. It felt wrong—and worthy of near-future Hail Marys.
“Over there, that one,” Gunther whispered.
He brushed against my leg and indicated a window over which a football throw had been haphazardly tossed. Light oozed through the length of fringe dangling just above the sill. Aware that my heart was doing its best to jump out of my ribcage, I peered in. A bird shrieked a piercing note from one of the nearby trees. I jumped. Gunther smacked his chops.
Exhaling through my nostrils, I looked again. The wedge of visible window revealed a scene that should have appeared normal in any other house, under most circumstances. Only a talking cat was urging me to break the law, and the longer I stared, the more wrong that glimpse became.
A recliner, beige. A man seated in that recliner, his eyes aimed ahead at the television. The TV was on low—and tuned to one of those worthless reality shows populated by spoiled rich families and manufactured drama.
The walls of the room had been mostly stripped down to the studs, with chunks of drywall hanging at angles from the paper skin. As I stared, afraid to blink, a thought crossed my mind—that the scores dug across the surviving pieces looked like nail marks. Like—
He tried to claw his way out of that room, I thought, turning my focus down, to the man’s hands, folded upon his lap. Right as my consciousness took note of the sickly color of the man’s arms—jaundiced yellow on top, purplish-blue on the undersides—I saw that his fingertips were damp and crimson, and missing several nails. The man’s clothes were filthy with dried dirt.
“That brain-dead show’s the only thing that’ll keep him calm,” Gunther whispered.
“Huh?” I asked, shooting a glance down at my partner in crime.
“That mindless garbage on the idiot box—the living dead eat it up, apparently.”
I returned to the window to see two rheumy, angry eyes now staring through the gap, aimed directly at me. A foul, cadaverous smell invaded my lungs as I sucked down a breath, readying to scream, only my body forgot how. I turned. Another figure stood between the neighbor’s house and my driveway, which seemed a mile away in the darkness. Farther. Light-years.
“What the hell are you doing?” a woman’s voice demanded.
Linda. Her long, dark hair and pinched face materialized fully, pulling free of the shadows. Instead of a scream, I produced a maniac’s laugh.
“Funny thing,” I said. I then offered what seemed the cleverest of explanations, improvised right on the spot. “I’m returning your cat.”
Then pain exploded across the back of my skull, and the darkness turned red around me. Through the exquisite glare, as the strength departed my legs and I dropped to the weedy, untended lawn, I saw Mike had snuck up behind me, a length of lumber held in his grip like a Louisville Slugger.
§
I surfaced from the sea of blood and shadows, aware of the welt rising on the back of my head, and of the dank smell lingering in my nostrils. Not my close brush with a dead man this time, I realized I’d woken face down on a patch of dirt cellar floor. Theirs, I assumed. Resisting the urge to moan, even though the scream that had blossomed in my guts outside was now a ball of thunder ready to claw its way up my throat, I surveyed my surroundings. Their cellar, oh yeah—a length of rickety countertop made from an old door set across two saw horses was littered with empty longnecks and drug-making equipment. At least, I deduced as much, given that there was an open flame and noxious chemical fumes rising from what looked like your average, ordinary kitchen crock-pot.
“You made it crooked,” Linda carped.
“Where?” Mike asked.
“That angle—it’s supposed to be straight.”
“Does it matter?”
She tisked. I tipped my eye up to see them in the process of digging a crude pentagram into the dirt floor around me. Linda sipped from a fresh bottle and directed traffic. Mike clutched at an ancient tome—the book of spells they’d already murdered once over—and stabbed at dirt with a garden trowel. Both wore black ceremonial raiments. I blinked, and realized their attire were terrycloth bathrobes, belted at waists.
I attempted to move, only to discover my arms were bound.
“He’s awake,” said Mike.
“So?” Linda countered. She knocked back the last of her beer and belched.
“Classy,” I said while also doing my best to ignore the miserable pulse radiating outward from what I assumed to be quite the swollen egg on my skull. “But then again, you two always are a couple of beauts.”
“Shut up, meat,” Linda said.
“Yeah, ask anyone in the neighborhood,” I continued, not heeding her initial warning. “We all love you guys. Can’t thank you enough for moving in and driving up property values with your fancy renovation work—and voodoo.”
“Hey, this isn’t voodoo,” Mike corrected. “And we’re sorry!”
“You look it.”
“We’re sorry, but what do you expect us to do? If you had an unwanted ghoul camped out in your living room, you’d do whatever it takes, too, to get rid of him. Even make a blood sacrifice to the King of the Underground Tide in order to evict him, dammit!”
I absorbed the idiot’s words. “King of the Underground Tide?”
Mike straightened and opened the tome. A few flips, and he aimed the horrific image of an amphibian face from an old woodblock illustration down at me. “The spell is very specific—if it’s not done with the blood of the innocent, instead of taking the dead away to the underground realm with him, the King’s rage could spill over across the surface world. You understand, right neighbor?”
I peered above the hideous picture to the equally repugnant face inside the bathrobe’s cowl, as clueless of his guilt as the danger they flirted with. And then, I shouted one of those words my parents had forbidden me to utter during my youth to the threat of a mouth washed out with soap.
“That’s straight enough, boo,” Linda said, and tossed her empty beer bottle. She then faced me. “Sorry to say it, but your house is about to go on the market, meat.”
Outside the pentagram, Mike began to recite from the book: “Ungh! Ungh! Inzwichen und under das Bluet…”
I struggled against my bindings. “You sound like you’re hacking up a hairball, you moron!”
“I said, shut up!” Linda spat.
She risked a kick past the spokes of the five-sided star and nailed me in the kidney. Now, two places on my body stung.
Mike sighed. “We have to start over—you contaminated the crux.”
“Fine, but before you resume, gag him so we don’t have to listen to his yapping.”
Mike searched among the makeshift counter’s drug laboratory. I was about to scream for help—not that anyone would hear me—when a scratch sounded on the other side of what I assumed was the cellar door. Furtive at first, it quickly grew more insistent.
“It’s that damn cat,” Mike said.
Linda answered, “The cat-cat, or, you know…Kenneth?”
“How do I know?”
The scratching became a banging.
“I’ll kill whichever one of them it is,” said Mike. He tromped up the cellar stairs and banged open the door. “What, dammit?”
A ribbon of orange color darted between his legs and down the stairs.
“Stupid cat,” Mike said.
“Forget about him,” said Linda. “Let’s do this. My TV show comes on at nine.”
Mike plodded back down the stairs, the book again opened. He coughed, clearing his throat. “Keep that mangy little puke out of the crux.”
Linda spat at the cat. Gunther, meandering past the pentagram, tensed. Ears back and eyes wide, he moved sideways away from the pentagram, me, and his two dirt bag owners.
“What? You got nothing to say tonight?” Mike said to the cat. “’Cause you sure were chatty earlier.”
Gunther receded. Mike and Linda turned to face me. From the cut of my eye, I saw the cat spring onto the counter and nose around whatever illegal substances were cooking there.
“Ungh! Ungh!” Mike bellowed.
Gunther nudged. Something tumbled across the table, catching fire before spilling to the ground. Sparks erupted. Little fiery pinwheels crackled, one catching Linda’s cheek as she turned toward the building conflagration.
“Son of a—!” she exclaimed, cut off in mid-speech by another projectile cutting close to her face.
“That mangy cat!” Mike added.
He scrambled after Gunther, who raced through his clutching hand. As their attention turned to the fire, Gunther’s weight landed on my back.
“I’ll get you out of these, friend,” Gunther said.
Nails and teeth dug at my bound wrists. Nails and teeth also jabbed through my flesh.
“I think I’m good,” I said, and maneuvered to my knees, coaxing the cat off my spine.
On my feet, the world spun. Ignoring the dizziness, I hastened to the staircase, taking the steps unsteadily.
“The meat’s escaping!” Linda howled.
I was at the top of the stairs when the explosion at my back propelled me through the cellar door.
§
The floor was on fire. Part of the ceiling, too.
“Wake up! Wake up!” Gunther yowled.
I reached for my face. My wrists were free. Either the shockwave had twisted the bindings loose or Gunther had done more to release me than I’d thought. Of course, it was also possible that Mike, the idiot, had done a lousy job at tying my wrists.
I got up, dazed and bleeding, sputtering on the growing smoke, unsure of where I was or which direction to take.
“This way,” the cat said.
I followed him down a dark and hazy hallway, only to stop when he did.
“Well, look at that,” said Gunther.
I looked up to see a shadowy figure blocking our escape. It was the dead man.
“Neighbors,” I said.
From somewhere else in the smoke-choked landscape, a human voice began to meow—Kenneth, I thought. The dead man raised his bloodied hands at me and lunged. Aiming my head low, I rushed the animated corpse and drove my noggin into its gut. Dead weight collapsed. Gunther and I pounded over the cadaver, and to the house’s rear door.
I pulled chain, flipped deadbolt, and unlocked lock. Then, Gunther and I were running into fresh air, away from the green house and toward home.
At my driveway, I turned back. The flames engulfed the ground floor and were spreading quickly to the upper level. The same window covered in football throw blew out. As fire and oily smoke billowed through the gap, for a terrible second the explosion took on a familiar image, that of an amphibious face, there one instant, gone the next.
§
They pulled four sets of charred human remains from the wreckage. The house burned completely in what was assumed the result of a meth lab fire. A tragedy, my neighbors agreed. And a relief.
§
“So,” said Gunther, waiting beside the empty food bowl.
“So?” I parroted.
“Can we make this official? You and me? Because I think you’ve earned the right to have yourself a great forever cat, pal.”
Smiling for what felt the first time in years, I pulled a can of albacore tuna from the cabinet. “I agree. We make a great team.”