Black Cat Night

This story contains references to injury and death.

The cat was black with a darkness that had no texture, a cat-shaped hole in the known world, an absence of light as dense as those moonless nights when you climb out of bed and can’t see to maintain your balance, let alone walk the few impalpable feet to the bathroom. In the stygian face two olivine ellipses burned with intent. The cat glided, other-worldly, across the road and silently absorbed itself into a laurel hedge. Not a leaf stirred to mark its passage. Even the street sounds stilled. The patch of hedge where the cat had disappeared remained just a hedge. At the point where it had first slunk into sight, out of a tenebrous shade darker even than the autumn gloom, the trunk of a huge maple bulged onto the sidewalk. The great tree’s bark was stripped in places, pale wounds dripping with sap. There had been carnage here.

Two nights ago, in the moonless dark, a sporty black vehicle blasted down the street. The driver strangled the wheel in a grip so fierce that her knuckles, striped here and there with blood, gleamed white in the glow from the dash.  Body tensed, face drawn and white, eyes straining from their shaded caverns, she focused on the patch of road visible in pools of yellow light. She should not have been driving down that street on that night, certainly not at the speed she was going and with alcohol in her blood. Afterwards, her friends would add up the ways the events of that night could have been avoided. If only she had taken an Uber to the bar that night, leaving her car in the garage. If only she had been less careful and stayed for one more drink instead of leaving early and alone. If only she had used her seatbelt, the air bag may have saved her life, at least. But why was she driving at that speed (police teams calculated her speed at the time of impact at over fifty miles per hour) at the opposite end of town from her apartment? Why did she first swerve and only then brake, sending the car careering across Maple St to slam into the tree? No one was there to witness the crash, but many of the residents were woken by the screech of tires on the tarmac and the visceral thump of the car.

But all that came later.

Ava had the world at her feet. Due to graduate from law school, she was already on the way to making herself indispensable at the most prestigious law firm in her chosen city. She was ticking off the bullet points of her life plan; qualification (with honors), job in a Big Three firm, inner city apartment, to be followed in time by partnership, husband, children. In that order. On this evening, the last Friday before Halloween, she stayed late at work, as usual making sure she had gone beyond what was expected of her. Now she was running late. Her phone pinged with another message. ‘All here! Wyd?’ She glanced at the message notification. The screen still showed her Uber request. Twenty minutes away! She couldn’t wait that long; she was so late already. She grabbed the car keys. ‘Coming! C u sn,’ she typed, one-handed, as she hurried downstairs.

The tavern was rocking. Golden pumpkins decorated the bar and hulked on each table. The whole department was there, and Ava was greeted with shouts of welcome, a glass thrust into her hand. Her team leader, Adrian, turned and gathered her in to stand beside him at the leaner. He raised his glass. ‘I finished the summary on City v Silverman…’ she began, but Adrian shook his head. “No, you don’t,’ he said. ‘No work talk allowed. You’ve done way more than enough today.’ Ava giggled self-consciously. She really did like Adrian. He reminded her of her brother George, perpetually twenty-five in her mind, dark good looks, toothpaste smile. The memory of his face was a precious one, despite the despair which had submerged her for months after the accident that ended his life, at Halloween, exactly three years ago. She clinked her glass against Adrian’s and decided to enjoy herself tonight. The karaoke machine was lit up, and already one of the office juniors was singing. The chatter of conversation became a roar, and Ava had to turn her head and lean into Adrian’s lips to hear what he was saying. Her drink was in danger of slopping over as she was jostled by people pushing past to the miniature dance floor. Adrian shrugged and grinned, tugging on her glass and smiling into her face as he raised his eyebrows in a mute query. She smiled back and let him take her glass and place it on the bar. Soon they were sweating and pulsing with the others. Several songs later, feeling hot and dehydrated, she caught Adrian’s eye and pointed towards the bathrooms. ‘Back soon,’ she shouted, above the din. But she never did get back.

Ava was fluffing her hair in the bathroom mirror with wet hands when she caught sight of a movement behind her and froze, elbows forming pyramids on either side of her head. Eyes widening, heart pounding, she swung around, but there was nothing there. Facing the mirror again she could see him. George, frowning, shaking his head. George as she remembered him, but not quite as she remembered. His eyes had never gleamed with that green light before, and his face was smooth, immobile, like a plasticine mask of the boy she knew. He shook his head again and was gone. Ava bent over the basin, splashing water over her face as a whirlpool of dizziness threatened to overwhelm her. She stood like that, fingers clinging to the edge of the marble, until the door burst open with a rush of noise and two girls came laughing in.

It wasn’t the first time. She had seen him twice before. Always on Halloween. The first time, the first anniversary of his death, . Then a year ago, before the last and most important of her final exams for her bachelor’s degree, he had sat on her bed as she worked at the desk, smiling and nodding in approval. The knowledge of his confidence in her had buoyed her through the two three-hour ordeals, and she had achieved her highest marks yet, and first in the class. But she had never seen him quite like this before, George but not George, his face a mask, his eyes unearthly. There was no smile now, just a puckered plastic frown and those weird gleaming eyes. Ava shivered, pushed through the swinging doors, and marched, eyes on the floor, to the exit. Adrian looked up from the bar where they had huddled together, and half rose from his perch, but she swept past without a glance. Wordlessly, he watched her go.

Standing by the car, fumbling to find the right button on the hob, she sensed a presence behind her again. She turned. George-but-not-George, an apparition, glowing eyes, a dark syrupy streak now creeping down one pale cheek. ‘The cat,’ he said, his voice low and rasping. ‘The cat. Watch out for the cat.’ In the dark his eyes smoldered, his black hair hanging over his brow and accentuating their greenish fire. His teeth showed white and sharp behind his lips.

Ava shrank back against the car, the ridged metal of the roof pressing into her back. ‘Who are you?’ she croaked. ‘What do you want?’

‘The cat means death.’

He came closer, and Ava, shaking all over now, lost her nerve completely and she swung and sank to her hands and knees, pressing her forehead against the cold steel of the door. She thought she screamed and felt her knuckles grate against the rough asphalt of the road. How long she crouched there she didn’t know, but when the silence seeped into her frantic brain, she found the courage to turn her head. She was alone. Sobbing in fear she pressed the key hob over and over, until she realized that the lock mechanism was responding with each panicked push; click, click, click. She could move again, and she wrenched the door open and flung herself into the driver’s seat. In a moment the engine roared. The black car pulsed into the night.

She drove fast and blind, whimpering, fixing her gaze on the lake of light beyond the windscreen. Trees, hedges, and gateways whipped past, hardly seen. She raced through a red light, then a stop sign, straight ahead with her foot to the floor. A lump of black in the road ahead drew her attention and she flinched and leaned over the steering wheel. Closer it came, an amorphous pool of pitch which elongated and twisted as the shadows from the moving headlights rolled over it. Closer, and the shadows began to coalesce into familiarity. A head and body, triangular ears. The light reflected green from the slanted eyes. She screamed again as the shape erupted into a leaping cat, forelegs reaching for the speeding car, every claw extended, and she swung the wheel.

Ava was flung through the shattered windscreen and deposited face up beneath the tree’s spreading canopy, sightless eyes gazing heavenward. Her thick black hair, gleaming and full-bodied, cradled her white, pristine face, full red lips slightly parted to reveal flawless teeth. She was beautiful and perfect in death. Golden leaves rained over her still body and the mangled black metal, as if drawing a gentle blanket over the dead. The maple continued to weep gilded tears over the ground where she had lain for some time after the scene was cleared. The only visible injuries the medics found were the bloody grazes on the knuckles of both hands. The startled residents who hurried from their homes to see what had happened didn’t notice a coal black cat dart down the trunk on the far side of the tree from the smoking wreckage, and streak away.