[Nyarlathotep] I'm thinking this for the next campaign...

Wed Aug 12 23:09:55 UTC 2015



 The Price  by Neil Gaiman  Tramps and vagabonds have marks they make on gateposts andtrees and doors, letting others of their kind know a little aboutthe people who live at the houses and farms they pass on theirtravels. I think cats must leave similar signs; how else toexplain the cats who turn up at our door through the year, hungryand flea-ridden and abandoned?We take them in. We get rid of the fleas and the ticks, feedthem and take them to the vet. We pay for them to get theirshots, and, indignity upon indignity, we have them neutered orspayed. And they stay with us, for a few months, or for a year, orfor ever.Most of them arrive in summer. We live in the country, justthe right distance out of town for the city-dwellers to abandontheir cats near us. We never seem to have more than eight cats, rarely have lessthan three. The cat population of my house is currently asfollows: Hermione and Pod, tabby and black respectively, the madsisters who live in my attic office, and do not mingle; Princess,the blue-eyed long-haired white cat, who lived wild in the woodsfor years before she gave up her wild ways for soft sofas andbeds; and, last but largest, Furball, Princess's cushion-likecalico long-haired daughter, orange and black and white, whom Idiscovered as a tiny kitten in our garage one day, strangled andalmost dead, her head poked through an old badminton net, and whosurprised us all by not dying but instead growing up to be thebest-natured cat I have ever encountered.And then there is the black cat. Who has no other name thanthe Black Cat, and who turned up almost a month ago. We did notrealise he was going to be living here at first: he looked toowell-fed to be a stray, too old and jaunty to have beenabandoned. He looked like a small panther, and he moved like apatch of night.One day, in the summer, he was lurking about our ramshackleporch: eight or nine years old, at a guess, male, greenish-yellowof eye, very friendly, quite unperturbable. I assumed he belongedto a neighbouring farmer or household.I went away for a few weeks, to finish writing a book, andwhen I came home he was still on our porch, living in an old cat-bed one of the children had found for him. He was, however,almost unrecognisable. Patches of fur had gone, and there weredeep scratches on his grey skin. The tip of one ear was chewedaway. There was a gash beneath one eye, a slice gone from onelip. He looked tired and thin.We took the Black Cat to the vet, where we got him someantibiotics, which we fed him each night, along with soft catfood.We wondered who he was fighting. Princess, our white,beautiful, near-feral queen? Raccoons? A rat-tailed, fangedpossum? Each night the scratches would be worse -- one night hisside would be chewed-up; the next, it would be his underbelly,raked with claw marks and bloody to the touch.When it got to that point, I took him down to the basementto recover, beside the furnace and the piles of boxes. He wassurprisingly heavy, the Black Cat, and I picked him up andcarried him down there, with a cat-basket, and a litter bin, andsome food and water. I closed the door behind me. I had to washthe blood from my hands, when I left the basement.He stayed down there for four days. At first he seemed tooweak to feed himself: a cut beneath one eye had rendered himalmost one-eyed, and he limped and lolled weakly, thick yellowpus oozing from the cut in his lip.I went down there every morning and every night, and I fedhim, and gave him antibiotics, which I mixed with his cannedfood, and I dabbed at the worst of the cuts, and spoke to him. Hehad diarrhoea, and, although I changed his litter daily, thebasement stank evilly.The four days that the Black Cat lived in the basement werea bad four days in my house: the baby slipped in the bath, andbanged her head, and might have drowned; I learned that a projectI had set my heart on -- adapting Hope Mirrlees' novel Lud inthe Mist for the BBC -- was no longer going to happen, and Irealised that I did not have the energy to begin again fromscratch, pitching it to other networks, or to other media; mydaughter left for Summer Camp, and immediately began to send homea plethora of heart-tearing letters and cards, five or six eachday, imploring us to take her away; my son had some kind of fightwith his best friend, to the point that they were no longer onspeaking terms; and returning home one night, my wife hit a deer,who ran out in front of the car. The deer was killed, the car wasleft undriveable, and my wife sustained a small cut over one eye.By the fourth day, the cat was prowling the basement,walking haltingly but impatiently between the stacks of books andcomics, the boxes of mail and cassettes, of pictures and of giftsand of stuff. He mewed at me to let him out and, reluctantly, Idid so.He went back onto the porch, and slept there for the rest ofthe day.The next morning there were deep, new gashes in his flanks,and clumps of black cat-hair -- his -- covered the wooden boardsof the porch.Letters arrived that day from my daughter, telling us thatCamp was going better, and she thought she could survive a fewdays; my son and his friend sorted out their problem, althoughwhat the argument was about -- trading cards, computer games,Star Wars or A Girl -- I would never learn. The BBC Executive whohad vetoed Lud in the Mist was discovered to have been takingbribes (well, 'questionable loans') from an independentproduction company, and was sent home on permanent leave: hissuccessor, I was delighted to learn, when she faxed me, was thewoman who had initially proposed the project to me before leavingthe BBC.I thought about returning the Black Cat to the basement, butdecided against it. Instead, I resolved to try and discover whatkind of animal was coming to our house each night, and from thereto formulate a plan of action -- to trap it, perhaps.For birthdays and at Christmas my family gives me gadgetsand gizmos, pricy toys which excite my fancy but, ultimately,rarely leave their boxes. There is a food dehydrator and anelectric carving knife, a bread-making machine, and, last year'spresent, a pair of see-in-the-dark binoculars. On Christmas Day Ihad put the batteries into the binoculars, and had walked aboutthe basement in the dark, too impatient even to wait untilnightfall, stalking a flock of imaginary Starlings. (You werewarned not to turn it on in the light: that would have damagedthe binoculars, and quite possibly your eyes as well.) AfterwardsI had put the device back into its box, and it sat there still,in my office, beside the box of computer cables and forgottenbits and pieces.Perhaps, I thought, if the creature, dog or cat or raccoonor what-have-you, were to see me sitting on the porch, it wouldnot come, so I took a chair into the box-and-coat-room, littlelarger than a closet, which overlooks the porch, and, wheneveryone in the house was asleep, I went out onto the porch, andbade the Black Cat goodnight.That cat, my wife had said, when he first arrived, is aperson. And there was something very person-like in his huge,leonine face: his broad black nose, his greenish-yellow eyes, hisfanged but amiable mouth (still leaking amber pus from the rightlower lip).I stroked his head, and scratched him beneath the chin, andwished him well. Then I went inside, and turned off the light onthe porch.I sat on my chair, in the darkness inside the house, withthe see-in-the-dark binoculars on my lap. I had switched thebinoculars on, and a trickle of greenish light came from theeyepieces.Time passed, in the darkness.I experimented with looking at the darkness with thebinoculars, learning to focus, to see the world in shades ofgreen. I found myself horrified by the number of swarming insectsI could see in the night air: it was as if the night world weresome kind of nightmarish soup, swimming with life. Then I loweredthe binoculars from my eyes, and stared out at the rich blacksand blues of the night, empty and peaceful and calm.Time passed. I struggled to keep awake, found myselfprofoundly missing cigarettes and coffee, my two lost addictions.Either of them would have kept my eyes open. But before I hadtumbled too far into the world of sleep and dreams a yowl fromthe garden jerked me fully awake. I fumbled the binoculars to myeyes, and was disappointed to see that it was merely Princess,the white cat, streaking across the front garden like a patch ofgreenish-white light. She vanished into the woodland to the leftof the house, and was gone.I was about to settle myself back down, when it occurred tome to wonder what exactly had startled Princess so, and I beganscanning the middle distance with the binoculars, looking for ahuge raccoon, a dog, or a vicious possum. And there was indeedsomething coming down the driveway, towards the house. I couldsee it through the binoculars, clear as day.It was the Devil.I had never seen the Devil before, and, although I hadwritten about him in the past, if pressed would have confessedthat I had no belief in him, other than as an imaginary figure,tragic and Miltonion. The figure coming up the driveway was notMilton's Lucifer. It was the Devil.My heart began to pound in my chest, to pound so hard thatit hurt. I hoped it could not see me, that, in a dark house,behind window-glass, I was hidden.The figure flickered and changed as it walked up the drive.One moment it was dark, bull-like, minotaurish, the next it wasslim and female, and the next it was a cat itself, a scarred,huge grey-green wildcat, its face contorted with hate.There are steps that lead up to my porch, four white woodensteps in need of a coat of paint (I knew they were white,although they were, like everything else, green through mybinoculars). At the bottom of the steps, the Devil stopped, andcalled out something that I could not understand, three, perhapsfour words in a whining, howling language that must have been oldand forgotten when Babylon was young; and, although I did notunderstand the words, I felt the hairs raise on the back of myhead as it called.And then I heard, muffled through the glass, but stillaudible, a low growl, a challenge, and, slowly, unsteadily, ablack figure walked down the steps of the house, away from me,toward the Devil. These days the Black Cat no longer moved like apanther, instead he stumbled and rocked, like a sailor onlyrecently returned to land.The Devil was a woman, now. She said something soothing andgentle to the cat, in a tongue that sounded like French, andreached out a hand to him. He sank his teeth into her arm, andher lip curled, and she spat at him.The woman glanced up at me, then, and if I had doubted thatshe was the Devil before, I was certain of it now: the woman'seyes flashed red fire at me; but you can see no red through thenight-vision binoculars, only shades of a green. And the Devilsaw me, through the window. It saw me. I am in no doubt aboutthat at all.The Devil twisted and writhed, and now it was some kind ofjackal, a flat-faced, huge-headed, bull-necked creature, halfwaybetween a hyena and a dingo. There were maggots squirming in itsmangy fur, and it began to walk up the steps.The Black Cat leapt upon it, and in seconds they became arolling, writhing thing, moving faster than my eyes could follow.All this in silence.And then a low roar -- down the country road at the bottomof our drive, in the distance, lumbered a late-night truck, itsblazing headlights burning bright as green suns through thebinoculars. I lowered them from my eyes, and saw only darkness,and the gentle yellow of headlights, and then the red of rearlights as it vanished off again into the nowhere at all.When I raised the binoculars once more there was nothing tobe seen. Only the Black Cat, on the steps, staring up into theair. I trained the binoculars up, and saw something flying away -- a vulture, perhaps, or an eagle -- and then it flew beyond thetrees and was gone.I went out onto the porch, and picked up the Black Cat, andstroked him, and said kind, soothing things to him. He mewledpiteously when I first approached him, but, after a while, hewent to sleep on my lap, and I put him into his basket, and wentupstairs to my bed, to sleep myself. There was dried blood on mytee shirt and jeans, the following morning.That was a week ago. The thing that comes to my house does not come every night.But it comes most nights: we know it by the wounds on the cat,and the pain I can see in those leonine eyes. He has lost the useof his front left paw, and his right eye has closed for good.I wonder what we did to deserve the Black Cat. I wonder whosent him. And, selfish and scared, I wonder how much more he hasto give. -- 
Regards, Michael Cole   
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://rpgreview.net/pipermail/nyarlathotep_rpgreview.net/attachments/20150812/cb50b10f/attachment.htm>