“I want to see the basement,” he said.
Jordan nodded and led him into the living room, where the mirror took up nearly the entire wall, creating the illusion that the space was twice as large.
“You’ll never mistake that for another cat again!” Jordan said. Mort(e) figured that she had scribbled this line on her clipboard, now covered in fur and saliva.
“I would like to see the basement,” he said again.
“Maybe we should stick to the top floors,” Jordan said. “There’s still some repair work to be done in the cellar.” Mort(e) detected a human-like mewling in her voice, as if she were saying, “Come on.” She was hiding something.
He headed for the basement.
“Mort(e), wait,” she said. “We had a new bed installed in the master bedroom.”
“I slept downstairs,” he said, flipping on the light switch.
Jordan was behind him as he descended, her hand reaching for his shoulder. “We put in some new drapes, too,” she pleaded. “They have flowers!”
He scanned the room. Nothing was out of place. There was still a bag of laundry, the blue sleeve of a hoodie sticking out the top. The computer sat on Daniel’s desk, its screen covered with dust. But there was some other odor mixed in, polluting the memory. It took two deep inhalations before Mort(e) picked it up: Magic Marker. Probably a day old, maybe less.
“Mort(e),” Jordan said, “we’ve had some vandals in the area.”
A homemade shelf full of VHS tapes took up part of the wall. Some cassettes had the titles scribbled in marker—Garfield Halloween Special, Innerspace—but these were too old to be giving off the scent. Mort(e)’s head swiveled toward a curtain hanging from an exposed pipe in the ceiling. It concealed the water heater and the furnace, where Mort(e) — or the cat that Mort(e) used to be — spent those last few minutes with Sheba on the day she ran away.
Before he could get to the curtain, Jordan grabbed his tail. There were few gestures more insulting than this. Even mothers did not do it to their kittens.
“It wasn’t my fault,” she said. “I didn’t know until this morning. It was too late to tell you not to come.”
“Calm down,” Mort(e) said, gently taking his tail back.
She blubbered like a human, all sniffles and gasps. “We were going to send a team in the morning before you saw. I can’t lose this job. I don’t have any other skills.”
“I don’t care about vandals,” he said. “I’m just glad to be home again.”
She kept crying despite his insistence that everything was fine.
He slid the curtain aside, eliciting a metallic ring from the pipe. The sound was still echoing when Mort(e) spotted the graffiti on the wall.
In bright red Magic Marker, a message read, SHEBA IS ALIVE.
Jordan began spouting apologies, swearing that people were on their way to fix things. Mort(e) closed the curtain and escorted her to the door, assuring her that he did not need to tour the rest of the house. “I should be giving you the tour,” he said. She kept saying that the Bureau could clean the mess, but Mort(e) insisted he would handle it. He shut the door on her just as her tail whisked through.
Mort(e) inhaled deeply, but the musty air did not yield a trace of Sheba. Is this what you wanted? he asked himself. To sniff around for her all day like some senile pig? Mort(e) caught a glimpse of himself shrugging in the mirror. Yes, he thought. Why not? He had earned it. He could be a junkie on her scent. Some of the older chokers had taken that route.
The staircase creaked under his weight when it had once remained quiet for him. He passed the bathroom where Daniel drowned Sheba’s pups. He opened the bedroom where Janet and Daniel had slept. The blue comforter hung off the bed, and the layer of dust suggested that nothing had been moved since the evacuation.
He opened the door to the attic, which allowed a chilly breeze to flow down the stairs. Mort(e) walked up, peering over the last step to survey the floor. It was the least changed room in the house, though the window was broken, the only visible damage so far. The boxes, racks of coats, and old toys waited for him. There was an untouched spot near the box full of winter coats where he and Sheba had once slept after conquering this new land. That was one of the greatest days of his life. Mort(e) approached the space, knelt down, and stubbornly sniffed again. But there was only the smell of old wood.
He returned to the basement. The furnace kicked on, rumbling with its glowing blue flame. Somewhere a team of animals had begun repairing the gas and water lines to make this possible, another sign of steady progress toward normalcy. Mort(e) sat cross-legged, his tail flicking the metal hull of the furnace. He had to pretend to smell Sheba, just as he had to pretend that the scrawled message was not there. Part of him wanted to believe it, and to ignore the likelihood that one of the survivors from the neighborhood must have written it in order to get to him somehow. Perhaps it was the dog across the street, Hank, who had known Sheba in a way that Mort(e) never could. It was possible that the dog still viewed Mort(e) as a rival, or blamed him for the death of Sheba’s puppies. Or maybe it was the stray cats who once lived outside.
Mort(e) considered the possibility that whoever wrote it was in the final stages of EMSAH, foaming at the mouth and speaking nonsense. If that was true, and the ants found out about it, his hometown would become a mere rumor, a hexagon pattern in the dirt.
Regardless of who wrote the message, Sheba was no longer alive. She couldn’t be. Her trail had gone cold, with no clues anywhere. Mort(e) had to force himself to accept her loss and grieve. A stupid sign was not going to change anything.
Chapter Seven: A Procession of Lifeless Eyes
Mort(e) could smell in his dreams. He could detect paint, dog fur, oak, roasting chicken, squirrel urine, bird feed, the water in the toilet, perfume, old rugs, musty blankets, fabric softener. Even if he were blind in his dreams, it would not have mattered, for an entire world remained at his disposal.
While sleeping in his favorite spot in the basement, he dreamt that the Martinis’ SUV pulled into the driveway, its wheels blocking out the light in the windows. The scent of the two children lingered in his nostrils, all sugar, shampoo, and baby powder. When he awoke, he realized that the sound was real — a car was in the driveway. Two doors opened and then slammed shut. He could hear only one set of footsteps, the telltale clicking of hooves. The other pair of feet must have belonged either to a cat or a very disciplined dog.
Five days had passed since Mort(e) moved in. Every night since his return, he slept before the message on the basement wall. He lay there now, eyes half opened. The graffiti was still there, its Magic Marker scent dispersing among the other odors of the basement. SHEBA IS ALIVE, it still said. A reminder, perhaps. A warning. A promise. A dream.
He waited for the doorbell to ring before getting up.
The bell sounded three more times before he got to it. Opening the door, he saw a six-foot-tall pig before him. While cats and dogs were common, rehabilitated farm animals were a rarity, at least in this part of the country. Many people assumed that animals who had been raised on farms lacked the intelligence to survive in this new world. This was merely a rumor, most likely concocted by bitter old cats who knew that they did not have much time to enjoy their new bodies. Still, horses, cows, and pigs had hooves, and many stopped walking upright because they felt that, without the glorious hands enjoyed by other animals, what was the point? Moreover, they had existed in cages or grazed in fields until the day when they would be slaughtered. Some pigs had gone to the extreme of plastic surgery, paying quack doctors to install tusks in their jaws so that they could claim to be wild boars rather than farm animals. A pig’s phony tusk fell out like a human toupee blowing off in the wind.