<html><body><div style="color:#000; background-color:#fff; font-family:HelveticaNeue, Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, Arial, Lucida Grande, Sans-Serif;font-size:16px"><font class="" id="yui_3_16_0_1_1439418352893_17426" face="Arial" size="4"><center class="" id="yui_3_16_0_1_1439418352893_17425">
<div class="" id="yui_3_16_0_1_1439418352893_17424"> <img data-id="dc3155b9-9607-553d-cd8e-35c728c0cf60" class="" src="http://www.bitchwick.com/amacker/bean/bean3.jpg">
</div><div id="yui_3_16_0_1_1439418352893_17489" class=""> The Price
</div><div id="yui_3_16_0_1_1439418352893_17486" class=""> by Neil Gaiman
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<font id="yui_3_16_0_1_1439418352893_17482" class="" face="Arial" size="3">
<div id="yui_3_16_0_1_1439418352893_17490" class=""> Tramps and vagabonds have marks they make on gateposts and
trees and doors, letting others of their kind know a little about
the people who live at the houses and farms they pass on their
travels. I think cats must leave similar signs; how else to
explain the cats who turn up at our door through the year, hungry
and flea-ridden and abandoned?
</div><div id="yui_3_16_0_1_1439418352893_18974" class="">
We take them in. We get rid of the fleas and the ticks, feed
them and take them to the vet. We pay for them to get their
shots, and, indignity upon indignity, we have them neutered or
spayed.
</div><div id="yui_3_16_0_1_1439418352893_18975" class="">
And they stay with us, for a few months, or for a year, or
for ever.
</div><div id="yui_3_16_0_1_1439418352893_17487" class="">
Most of them arrive in summer. We live in the country, just
the right distance out of town for the city-dwellers to abandon
their cats near us.
</div><div id="yui_3_16_0_1_1439418352893_17488" class="">
We never seem to have more than eight cats, rarely have less
than three. The cat population of my house is currently as
follows: Hermione and Pod, tabby and black respectively, the mad
sisters who live in my attic office, and do not mingle; Princess,
the blue-eyed long-haired white cat, who lived wild in the woods
for years before she gave up her wild ways for soft sofas and
beds; and, last but largest, Furball, Princess's cushion-like
calico long-haired daughter, orange and black and white, whom I
discovered as a tiny kitten in our garage one day, strangled and
almost dead, her head poked through an old badminton net, and who
surprised us all by not dying but instead growing up to be the
best-natured cat I have ever encountered.
</div><div id="yui_3_16_0_1_1439418352893_17491" class="">
And then there is the black cat. Who has no other name than
the Black Cat, and who turned up almost a month ago. We did not
realise he was going to be living here at first: he looked too
well-fed to be a stray, too old and jaunty to have been
abandoned. He looked like a small panther, and he moved like a
patch of night.
</div><div id="yui_3_16_0_1_1439418352893_17492" class="">
One day, in the summer, he was lurking about our ramshackle
porch: eight or nine years old, at a guess, male, greenish-yellow
of eye, very friendly, quite unperturbable. I assumed he belonged
to a neighbouring farmer or household.
</div><div class="">
I went away for a few weeks, to finish writing a book, and
when 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 were
deep scratches on his grey skin. The tip of one ear was chewed
away. There was a gash beneath one eye, a slice gone from one
lip. He looked tired and thin.
</div><div class="">
We took the Black Cat to the vet, where we got him some
antibiotics, which we fed him each night, along with soft cat
food.
</div><div class="">
We wondered who he was fighting. Princess, our white,
beautiful, near-feral queen? Raccoons? A rat-tailed, fanged
possum?
</div><div class="">
Each night the scratches would be worse -- one night his
side would be chewed-up; the next, it would be his underbelly,
raked with claw marks and bloody to the touch.
</div><div class="">
When it got to that point, I took him down to the basement
to recover, beside the furnace and the piles of boxes. He was
surprisingly heavy, the Black Cat, and I picked him up and
carried him down there, with a cat-basket, and a litter bin, and
some food and water. I closed the door behind me. I had to wash
the blood from my hands, when I left the basement.
</div><div class="">
He stayed down there for four days. At first he seemed too
weak to feed himself: a cut beneath one eye had rendered him
almost one-eyed, and he limped and lolled weakly, thick yellow
pus oozing from the cut in his lip.
</div><div class="">
I went down there every morning and every night, and I fed
him, and gave him antibiotics, which I mixed with his canned
food, and I dabbed at the worst of the cuts, and spoke to him. He
had diarrhoea, and, although I changed his litter daily, the
basement stank evilly.
</div><div class="">
The four days that the Black Cat lived in the basement were
a bad four days in my house: the baby slipped in the bath, and
banged her head, and might have drowned; I learned that a project
I had set my heart on -- adapting Hope Mirrlees' novel Lud in
the Mist for the BBC -- was no longer going to happen, and I
realised that I did not have the energy to begin again from
scratch, pitching it to other networks, or to other media; my
daughter left for Summer Camp, and immediately began to send home
a plethora of heart-tearing letters and cards, five or six each
day, imploring us to take her away; my son had some kind of fight
with his best friend, to the point that they were no longer on
speaking 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 was
left undriveable, and my wife sustained a small cut over one eye.
</div><div class="">
By the fourth day, the cat was prowling the basement,
walking haltingly but impatiently between the stacks of books and
comics, the boxes of mail and cassettes, of pictures and of gifts
and of stuff. He mewed at me to let him out and, reluctantly, I
did so.
</div><div class="">
He went back onto the porch, and slept there for the rest of
the day.
</div><div class="">
The next morning there were deep, new gashes in his flanks,
and clumps of black cat-hair -- his -- covered the wooden boards
of the porch.
</div><div id="yui_3_16_0_1_1439418352893_17493" class="">
Letters arrived that day from my daughter, telling us that
Camp was going better, and she thought she could survive a few
days; my son and his friend sorted out their problem, although
what the argument was about -- trading cards, computer games,
Star Wars or A Girl -- I would never learn. The BBC Executive who
had vetoed Lud in the Mist was discovered to have been taking
bribes (well, 'questionable loans') from an independent
production company, and was sent home on permanent leave: his
successor, I was delighted to learn, when she faxed me, was the
woman who had initially proposed the project to me before leaving
the BBC.
</div><div id="yui_3_16_0_1_1439418352893_17494" class="">
I thought about returning the Black Cat to the basement, but
decided against it. Instead, I resolved to try and discover what
kind of animal was coming to our house each night, and from there
to formulate a plan of action -- to trap it, perhaps.
</div><div id="yui_3_16_0_1_1439418352893_17495" class="">
For birthdays and at Christmas my family gives me gadgets
and gizmos, pricy toys which excite my fancy but, ultimately,
rarely leave their boxes. There is a food dehydrator and an
electric carving knife, a bread-making machine, and, last year's
present, a pair of see-in-the-dark binoculars. On Christmas Day I
had put the batteries into the binoculars, and had walked about
the basement in the dark, too impatient even to wait until
nightfall, stalking a flock of imaginary Starlings. (You were
warned not to turn it on in the light: that would have damaged
the binoculars, and quite possibly your eyes as well.) Afterwards
I had put the device back into its box, and it sat there still,
in my office, beside the box of computer cables and forgotten
bits and pieces.
</div><div id="yui_3_16_0_1_1439418352893_18973" class="">
Perhaps, I thought, if the creature, dog or cat or raccoon
or what-have-you, were to see me sitting on the porch, it would
not come, so I took a chair into the box-and-coat-room, little
larger than a closet, which overlooks the porch, and, when
everyone in the house was asleep, I went out onto the porch, and
bade the Black Cat goodnight.
</div><div class="">
That cat, my wife had said, when he first arrived, is a
person. And there was something very person-like in his huge,
leonine face: his broad black nose, his greenish-yellow eyes, his
fanged but amiable mouth (still leaking amber pus from the right
lower lip).
</div><div class="">
I stroked his head, and scratched him beneath the chin, and
wished him well. Then I went inside, and turned off the light on
the porch.
</div><div id="yui_3_16_0_1_1439418352893_17485" class="">
I sat on my chair, in the darkness inside the house, with
the see-in-the-dark binoculars on my lap. I had switched the
binoculars on, and a trickle of greenish light came from the
eyepieces.
</div><div class="">
Time passed, in the darkness.
</div><div class="">
I experimented with looking at the darkness with the
binoculars, learning to focus, to see the world in shades of
green. I found myself horrified by the number of swarming insects
I could see in the night air: it was as if the night world were
some kind of nightmarish soup, swimming with life. Then I lowered
the binoculars from my eyes, and stared out at the rich blacks
and blues of the night, empty and peaceful and calm.
</div><div id="yui_3_16_0_1_1439418352893_17496" class="">
Time passed. I struggled to keep awake, found myself
profoundly missing cigarettes and coffee, my two lost addictions.
Either of them would have kept my eyes open. But before I had
tumbled too far into the world of sleep and dreams a yowl from
the garden jerked me fully awake. I fumbled the binoculars to my
eyes, and was disappointed to see that it was merely Princess,
the white cat, streaking across the front garden like a patch of
greenish-white light. She vanished into the woodland to the left
of the house, and was gone.
</div><div class="">
I was about to settle myself back down, when it occurred to
me to wonder what exactly had startled Princess so, and I began
scanning the middle distance with the binoculars, looking for a
huge raccoon, a dog, or a vicious possum. And there was indeed
something coming down the driveway, towards the house. I could
see it through the binoculars, clear as day.
</div><div class="">
It was the Devil.
</div><div class="">
I had never seen the Devil before, and, although I had
written about him in the past, if pressed would have confessed
that I had no belief in him, other than as an imaginary figure,
tragic and Miltonion. The figure coming up the driveway was not
Milton's Lucifer. It was the Devil.
</div><div class="">
My heart began to pound in my chest, to pound so hard that
it hurt. I hoped it could not see me, that, in a dark house,
behind window-glass, I was hidden.
</div><div id="yui_3_16_0_1_1439418352893_17497" class="">
The figure flickered and changed as it walked up the drive.
One moment it was dark, bull-like, minotaurish, the next it was
slim and female, and the next it was a cat itself, a scarred,
huge grey-green wildcat, its face contorted with hate.
</div><div class="">
There are steps that lead up to my porch, four white wooden
steps in need of a coat of paint (I knew they were white,
although they were, like everything else, green through my
binoculars). At the bottom of the steps, the Devil stopped, and
called out something that I could not understand, three, perhaps
four words in a whining, howling language that must have been old
and forgotten when Babylon was young; and, although I did not
understand the words, I felt the hairs raise on the back of my
head as it called.
</div><div class="">
And then I heard, muffled through the glass, but still
audible, a low growl, a challenge, and, slowly, unsteadily, a
black figure walked down the steps of the house, away from me,
toward the Devil. These days the Black Cat no longer moved like a
panther, instead he stumbled and rocked, like a sailor only
recently returned to land.
</div><div id="yui_3_16_0_1_1439418352893_18972" class="">
The Devil was a woman, now. She said something soothing and
gentle to the cat, in a tongue that sounded like French, and
reached out a hand to him. He sank his teeth into her arm, and
her lip curled, and she spat at him.
</div><div id="yui_3_16_0_1_1439418352893_17484" class="">
The woman glanced up at me, then, and if I had doubted that
she was the Devil before, I was certain of it now: the woman's
eyes flashed red fire at me; but you can see no red through the
night-vision binoculars, only shades of a green. And the Devil
saw me, through the window. It saw me. I am in no doubt about
that at all.
</div><div id="yui_3_16_0_1_1439418352893_18261" class="">
The Devil twisted and writhed, and now it was some kind of
jackal, a flat-faced, huge-headed, bull-necked creature, halfway
between a hyena and a dingo. There were maggots squirming in its
mangy fur, and it began to walk up the steps.
</div><div id="yui_3_16_0_1_1439418352893_18260" class="">
The Black Cat leapt upon it, and in seconds they became a
rolling, writhing thing, moving faster than my eyes could follow.
</div><div id="yui_3_16_0_1_1439418352893_18259" class="">
All this in silence.
</div><div id="yui_3_16_0_1_1439418352893_18258" class="">
And then a low roar -- down the country road at the bottom
of our drive, in the distance, lumbered a late-night truck, its
blazing headlights burning bright as green suns through the
binoculars. I lowered them from my eyes, and saw only darkness,
and the gentle yellow of headlights, and then the red of rear
lights as it vanished off again into the nowhere at all.
</div><div id="yui_3_16_0_1_1439418352893_17483" class="">
When I raised the binoculars once more there was nothing to
be seen. Only the Black Cat, on the steps, staring up into the
air. I trained the binoculars up, and saw something flying away -
- a vulture, perhaps, or an eagle -- and then it flew beyond the
trees and was gone.
</div><div id="yui_3_16_0_1_1439418352893_17481" class="">
I went out onto the porch, and picked up the Black Cat, and
stroked him, and said kind, soothing things to him. He mewled
piteously when I first approached him, but, after a while, he
went to sleep on my lap, and I put him into his basket, and went
upstairs to my bed, to sleep myself. There was dried blood on my
tee shirt and jeans, the following morning.
</div><div id="yui_3_16_0_1_1439418352893_17498" class="">
That was a week ago.
</div><div id="yui_3_16_0_1_1439418352893_17499" class="">
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 use
of his front left paw, and his right eye has closed for good.
</div><div id="yui_3_16_0_1_1439418352893_17500" class="" dir="ltr">
I wonder what we did to deserve the Black Cat. I wonder who
sent him. And, selfish and scared, I wonder how much more he has
to give.
</div></font></font><div id="yui_3_16_0_1_1439418352893_17423"><span></span></div><div id="yui_3_16_0_1_1439418352893_17501"> </div><div id="yui_3_16_0_1_1439418352893_17502" class="signature"><div id="yui_3_16_0_1_1439418352893_17511">-- <br></div><div id="yui_3_16_0_1_1439418352893_17571">Regards, Michael Cole</div></div> <div class="qtdSeparateBR"><br><br></div><div style="display: block;" id="yui_3_16_0_1_1439418352893_17575" class="yahoo_quoted"><div id="yui_3_16_0_1_1439418352893_17574" style="font-family: HelveticaNeue, Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, Arial, Lucida Grande, Sans-Serif; font-size: 16px;"><div id="yui_3_16_0_1_1439418352893_17573" style="font-family: HelveticaNeue, Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, Arial, Lucida Grande, Sans-Serif; font-size: 16px;"><blockquote id="yui_3_16_0_1_1439418352893_17572" style="border-left: 2px solid rgb(16, 16, 255); margin-left: 5px; margin-top: 5px; padding-left: 5px;"> </blockquote> </div> </div> </div></div></body></html>