The cat stood between her and what she must do. She aimed a light blow at him and missed. She was rewarded by scratches on the back of her hand, delivered with lightning quickness as the hand flashed past. Knowing a new kind of fright, she rose. The cat stalked, its back arched, to the end of the sofa. It pounced, leaving a bloody trail of claw marks down her naked thigh before landing on its feet and advancing toward her, making that horrible growling sound in its throat.
She ran. Bare breasts bobbled. She bumped the doorjamb painfully and gained the bedroom with the cat behind her, its claws digging into her calves. She screamed, leaped for the bathroom, and closed the door, narrowly missing catching the cat in it.
She did not realize, until she heard George’s voice calling her, that she’d been cheated of death. Shaking with it, weak, she had spent a timeless period locked in the bathroom, hearing the scratches on the door and the rumble of the cat’s growl. Then his voice.
“No,” she screamed. “No, George!” The cat. The cat.
“Honey?” He was so dear to her, so beautiful. He stood there, his white coveralls mussed and soiled, looking at her as she cowered against the far wall.
“My God, Gwen.” He had seen the blood, the crusted scratches. “What happened?”
“Satan,” she said.
“Satan?” He could not understand. “He’s asleep on the bed.”
“Satan, he—”
George caught her as she fell.
7
If one is healthy, she found, one survives. The right arm, severed by a sharp blade just below the shoulder, bone crushed, jagged, can be closed off with fire. The system goes into protective shock, being unable, while aware, to bear the pain. But one survives. Loss of blood is limited by the cauterizing. There is an endless period of pain. Two arms severed at once is more of a shock to the system and can kill. Healthy specimens can, at times, survive. Life lingers on, in any case, fighting, not taking the easy way of quick death. A jagged, dull blade can dismember the body limb by limb and leave occasional periods of consciousness during which pain is a roaring rush which takes possession of all the senses. A foot lopped off bleeds the vital substances of the body into the earth. A leg chopped off causes the body to fall down, to lie on the warm earth writhing in pain.
She knew all. They took her fingers, one by one, giving her time in between to regain consciousness. Then they cut off her hands at the wrists. Then, whack, the arms at the elbow. Thunk. At the shoulders. She screamed in pain, roared with it, bellowed it, wept with it, begged them to stop, and sought death. Whisk. A foot gone. Thunk. A leg at the knee.
She was a twisting, bucking, limbless torso, flopping on bloody earth, screaming. And relief came only after an eternity of suffering. Her blood refused to run; it just oozed slowly out, taking her life with it by degrees, leaving her a dulling awareness of death and a fading pain which, she knew, was terminal. There was only a spark of life in her. Her skin was rotting, sloughing off. Inside, the bones had begun to decay, yet still there was life, agonized, dying so slowly, so slowly.
“Please, please, please.”
“Gwen. Hey, Gwen. You’re fine. You’re all right.”
She didn’t even hurt.
“The doc gave you a sedative.”
“George?” Tears came. “Oh, George.”
“Easy, kid. You’re all right. I don’t know what got into that cat.” His face was so concerned. “He’s at the vet’s. They’ll have to keep him under observation. If he’s rabid—” He paused grimly.
The hospital was old and small and crowded. There were no private rooms. The woman in the other bed in Gwen’s room was a perky senior citizen with a new scar to indicate the removal of a non-malignant growth from her stomach. She was ambulatory and had quite an active tongue. She never slept. There was no opportunity for Gwen to talk. She had to tell a highly censored version of the event. Dr. Peter Braws, who had examined her in his office, was quite interested. He was a nice fellow, married to his office nurse, but with an eye which still appreciated femininity. Gwen told him and George that she’d been sun bathing, had come into the house to shower off the sun oil, and had been attacked without warning by the usually gentle pussycat. She felt guilty about slandering Satan. She knew why he had attacked, but with an audience she couldn’t explain it. She wasn’t even sure she could explain it to George.
During the first night she was under heavy sedation. It was into the next afternoon before Dr. Braws allowed her to come out of the drug haze long enough to think clearly. Then the full meaning of what had happened hit her anew and she wished, once again, for death. She could not bear to look into George’s cheerful face and think of what she’d done to him and to their love. To die was still the logical answer.
George guided her tenderly to the car, after two nights in the hospital. “I just don’t understand, honey,” he said, as he started the car. “Braws said you were highly wrought up, and that’s the question. What is it?” He didn’t tell her that the doctor had said Gwen was near the point of a complete breakdown. “Is it something I’ve done?”
His sincerity was a knife in her heart. “Oh, no,” she said. “No, no, no.”
“Well, you’re not to worry. I’m going to take good care of you.”
He did. At home, Sam, lonely with both Mandy and Satan gone, met them with happy barks and jumps and frantic, energetic runs around and around them as they went toward the house. Inside, George led her to bed and tucked her in. He set the timer on the clock radio for her pill time. She was on a rather powerful tranquilizer which made it easy to sleep and sleep. She lost track of time. The windows were open to the spring air and it was balmy and lovely. The tranquilizers allowed her to think, but killed the pain of thinking.
“Why was the shotgun in the living room, honey?” George asked. Had it been a day, two days? She didn’t answer. There was no simple answer. “You worry me, Gwen. Do you know that?”
“Yes.”
“Honey, we’ve got it made. We’ve got what most people struggle for all their lives, security, most anything we want, happiness. I haven’t taken a mistress or anything and I don’t beat you.”
There was no way of telling him.
“If anything ever happened to you, I think I’d walk into the pond and forget to come out,” George said.
It wasn’t fair. She was being asked to live with what she’d become. She was no better than her mother. She’d given her body gladly and wantonly. What she had always hated and condemned, she’d become. And he was telling her she had to accept it, and live with it. By forcing her to see how badly he’d be hurt, he was making it impossible for her to seek the easy way out.
She was dozing. It was another of those glorious May afternoons. She woke with a feeling of violation and found that George had joined her on her bed. He was dressed only in a bathing suit and his hands were on her. His hands pressed, through the thin pajama top, on her breasts, where the man, whose name she didn’t even know, had fondled her. “Don’t,” she said, without thinking.
He respected her wishes. But he was a sensuous man and he had no idea of her state of mind. That night he persisted. It was George, she told herself. Her husband. But when his hand went down to cover her feminine dampness, to press and explore, she could not hold back a near scream. She jerked away, trying not to sob aloud.
“Is that it?” George asked, not angry, just concerned. “Is it the same old gig?”
Why couldn’t she just die? He lay beside her, not touching her. “Gwen?”
“You could find someone else,” she said. “You’re young.”
“Gwen, that’s crazy talk.” His voice was strained. “Dr. Braws thinks, well, maybe—” She did not help him. “Well, Gwen, it would be no disgrace. I mean, lots of people need help.”