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What did it want from him?
He tried to tell himself again that he was overreacting. But he didn't believe it. His terror was real and so was the lingering aura of menace the torn had brought with it.
I've got to find it, he thought grimly. Find it and get rid of it once and for all.
Bedroom. Nightstand drawer. His .32 revolver.
Decker had never shot anything with the gun, for sport or otherwise; he'd only brought it along for security, since his nearest neighbor was half a mile away and the nearest town was another four miles beyond there. But he knew he would shoot the cat when he found it, irrational act or not. Just as he would have shot a human intruder who threatened him.
Once more he searched the cabin, forcing himself to do it slowly and methodically. He looked under and behind the furniture, inside the closets, under the sink, through cartons—every conceivable hiding place.
There was no sign of the tom.
His mouth and throat were sand-dry; he had to drink three glasses of water to ease the parching. The thought occurred to him then that he hadn't found the cat because the cat didn't exist; that it was a figment of his hyperactive imagination induced by the Brown story. Hallucination, paranoid obsession . . . maybe he was paranoid and delusional after all.
"Crap," he said aloud. "The damned cat's real."
He turned from the sink—and the cat was sitting on the kitchen table, glowing yellow eyes fixed on him, tail switching.
Decker made an involuntary sound, threw up his arm, and tried to aim the .32, but the arm shook so badly that he had to brace the gun with his free hand. The cat kept on staring at him. Except for the rhythmic flicks of its tail, it was as still as death.
His finger tightened on the trigger.
Switch.
And sudden doubts assailed him. What if the cat had telekinetic powers, and when he fired, it turned the bullet back at him? What if the cat was some monstrous freak of nature, endowed with superpowers, and before he could fire it willed him out of existence?
Supercat, he thought. Jesus, I am going crazy!
He pulled the trigger.
Nothing happened; the gun didn't fire.
The cat jumped down off the table, came toward him—not as it had earlier, but as if with a purpose.
Frantically Decker squeezed the trigger again, and again, and still the revolver failed to fire. The tom continued its advance. Decker backed away in terror, came up against the wall, then hurled the weapon at the cat, straight at the cat. It should have struck the cat squarely in the head, only at the last second it seemed to loop around the tom's head like a sharp-breaking curveball—
Vertigo seized him. The room began to spin, slowly, then rapidly, and there was a gray mist in front of his eyes. He felt himself starting to fall, shut his eyes, put out his hands to the wall in an effort to brace his body—
—and the wall wasn't there—
—and he kept right on falling . . .
Decker opened his eyes. He was lying on a floor, only it was not the floor of his rented kitchen; it was the floor of a gray place, a place without furnishings or definition, a place where the gray mist floated and shimmied and everything—walls, floor, ceiling—was distorted, surreal.
A nonplace. A cat place?
Something made a noise nearby. A cat sound unlike any he had ever heard or could have imagined—a shrill mewling roar.
Decker jerked his head around. And the tom was there, the tom filled the nonplace as if it had grown to human size while he had been shrunk to feline dimensions. It loomed over him, its tail switching, its whiskers quivering. When he saw it like that he tried to stand and run . . . and it reached out one massive paw, almost lazily, and brought it down on his chest, pi
Cats are predators with a streak of cruelly: they like to toy with their prey before devouring it.
"No!"
Big old tom like you, you need plenty of fuel.
Decker opened his mouth to scream again, but all that came out was a mouselike squeak.
And then it was feeding time. . . .
Don't be fooled by the touristy background descriptions in the following. What we have here is dark and deadly things lurking beneath an i
A Taste of Paradise
Jan and I met the Archersons at the Hotel Kolekole in Kailua Kona, on the first evening of our Hawaiian vacation. We'd booked four days on the Big Island, five on Maui, four on Kauai, and three and a half at Waikiki Beach on Oahu. It would mean a lot of shunting around, packing and unpacking, but it was our first and probably last visit to Hawaii and we had decided to see as many of the islands as we could. We'd saved three years for this trip—a second honeymoon we'd been promising ourselves for a long time—and we were determined to get the absolute most out of it.
Our room was small and faced inland; it was all we could afford at a luxury hotel like the Kolekole. So in order to sit and look at the ocean, we had to go down to the rocky, black-sand beach or to a roofed but open-sided lanai bar that overlooked the beach. The lanai bar was where we met Larry and Brenda Archerson. They were at the next table when we sat down for drinks before di
It was their first trip to Hawaii too, and the same sort of dream vacation as ours: "I've wanted to come here for thirty years," Brenda said, "ever since I first saw Elvis in Blue Hawaii." So we had that in common. But unlike us, they were traveling first-class. They'd spent a week in one of the most exclusive hotels on Maui, and had a suite here at the Kolekole, and would be staying in the islands for a total of five weeks. They were even going to spend a few days on Molokai, where Father Damien had founded his lepers' colony over a hundred years ago.
Larry told us all of this in an offhand, joking way—not at all flaunting the fact that they were obviously well-off. He was a tall, beefy fellow, losing his hair as I was and compensating for it with a thick brush moustache. Brenda was a big-boned blonde with pretty gray eyes. They both wore loud Hawaiian shirts and flower leis, and Brenda had a pale pink flower—a hibiscus blossom, she told Jan—in her hair. It was plain that they doted on each other and plain that they were having the time of their lives. They kept exchanging grins and winks, touching hands, kissing every now and then like newlyweds. It was infectious. We weren't with them ten minutes before Jan and I found ourselves holding hands too.
They were from Milwaukee, where they were about to open a luxury catering service. "Another lifelong dream," Brenda said. Which gave us something else in common, in an indirect way. Jan and I own a small restaurant in Coeur d'Alene, Carpenter's Steakhouse, which we'd built into a fairly successful business over the past twenty years. Our daughter Ly