The Catswold Portal

It wasn’t hard to find Morian in her blowing white dress, standing beside the spring. She took the hamburger, spread the wrapper out and weighted it with broken branches. She led him some distance away, into a shelter of wild azalea where the wind didn’t reach them so strongly. “Talk softly, maybe the sound of our voices will soothe her. Maybe once she eats, she’ll come to us.”

He felt ridiculous sitting in the middle of the woods waiting for a cat. Alice would be very amused. He wondered what the gardener had been going to do with it. “Why do you think it’s a female?”

“Most calico’s are. And that little face—very female.”

He didn’t know how she could be sure—it was just a cat. Frightened, though, and young. Its eyes had been huge. “It won’t come to you, Mor. It was too scared. Christ, what are we doing out here?”

“Just a little while, Brade.”

They sat in silence, their hands touching, chilled by the wind, waiting for a stray cat. She said, “It hurts me to see them like that, so afraid, and maybe injured. They’re so small; they weren’t meant for our cruelty. Tiger—he was so terribly hurt. I couldn’t help him. The vet says they go into shock, that they don’t feel the pain. I don’t know.” Her hand was holding his too tightly. “I couldn’t help him live, all I could do was help him die.”

He looked at her and said nothing. She had the same empathy for animals that Alice had had, a deep, intimate fellowship that he had never really felt and found hard to understand. After a long time she said, “I guess she isn’t going to come near the food while we’re here. Poor little thing. I wonder where she came from, where she belongs.”

“She’s just a stray cat, Mor.”

She gave him a hard look. “There’s no such thing as just a stray cat.” Then she grinned at him. “Are you just a stray person?” She rose and stood looking into the black woods.

“The wind makes her all the more frightened. Maybe if I put out food tomorrow when it’s calm, she’ll come to me.” She took his hand and they started down through the woods heading for his place.

The calico stalked the meat, but not until Braden and Morian had been gone for some time did she come near enough to gulp it. She ate all the hamburger, then drank from the spring, stopping several times to stare in the direction of the garden.

She was both drawn to the garden and afraid. She approached and shied away five times before she had worked her way down to the portal. Shivering, she smelled Vrech’s scent in the door and leaped away again, but she did not head back to the woods. She bolted down the hill toward the brick veranda, sensing safety there.

She avoided the lighted portion of the veranda where yellow squares from the windows angled across the brick, and took cover in the bushes at the far end. Safe in the familiar shelter, she washed, circled deep in the dry leaves and curled down, tucking her nose under her tail. With her white parts hidden, even in the invading washes of moonlight she looked like part of the dry leaves, her mottled coat the same color as the leaves.

Her dreams were filled with fear. She mewled sometimes, and her paws twitched and ran. But then as she slept more deeply the dreams became unclear to her cat nature. Meaningless dramas were played out, voices and scenes touched her which only the conscious Melissa would have understood.

Chapter 29

Braden was pulled out of a deep sleep, fighting to get his bearings. A sound had woken him—a scratching, clawing noise. Coming awake, he tried to figure out why he was sleeping on the model’s couch. Then he remembered, and reached for Morian. The next moment he came fully awake and saw that she had gone—her clothes were gone. He could smell coffee; she had made coffee. The scratching sound was like fingernails on glass. He stared toward the window wall.

There was a cat out there, rearing up, scratching at the glass. It was the cat from last night; the cat they’d sat up half the night trying to catch. The one he’d bruised his fist for. What was it doing here? He didn’t believe it was trying to get in through his door.

The cat had woken before daylight. The wind was gone. The garden was littered with broken branches, and birds flitted across them, searching for insects. She had started out from the bushes to hunt when a sound from the house made her draw back.

A figure had come out, her white dress rustling. She had crossed the veranda and headed up the hill, her scent on the still air familiar and comforting. The little cat rose to follow her, but then she glanced again toward the studio and settled down, yawning and stretching. She was dozing when a sparrow flew onto the veranda.