He purred some more, and then I heard them all purring, a soft, resonant hum that soothed and brought contentment.
“Enough already,” I said. “I can’t think of doing anything with you until the snow is cleared out anyway.” They purred even louder. I tried to count the cats, but I was beyond three dozen and getting confused about which I’d already counted when I gave up. There were more than fifty but less than a hundred.
I closed the door to the room and carried Snowball downstairs with me. “My, my, little friend. So that was the secret you were keeping. Well, you and your friends did a mighty good job of hiding. It was just a fluke that I caught you tonight.”
I carried Snowball into the kitchen with me, then put him down next to his litter box (which I’d fashioned from a shallow desk drawer and unused potting soil the night of his arrival).
Then it hit me. At the risk of sounding indelicate, I suddenly realized that the room with all the kittens in it didn’t stink. I had noticed no cat feces nor smelled the pungent aroma of stale urine which one should have expected.
Hmmm. This was even a bigger mystery.
Even with Snowball at the foot of my bed, I failed to sleep anymore that night.
The next day I came to a decision. Snowball was not on the bed, but he was sitting in the chair next to the nightstand, staring at me, almost as if he was taking my measure. So even though it was silly, I told him what I’d sorted out.
“Snowball, it’s clear to me that you and those other kitties are no ordinary cats. I don’t know where you came from or what you’re about, but you don’t seem to be causing any trouble, and you all seem smart enough to go outside to take care of your, er, personal hygiene requirements. I can’t feed you all, but you don’t seem to need me for that anyhow. So you and the other cats can stay in the church unless or until you become a problem, OK? Lord knows, and I mean that literally, what your purpose is here, but you’ve got free rent until you do something to make me change my mind. ”
Silly? Of course. But Snowball understood and then he left me for a time, perhaps to run off to tell the others of my decision. Who could say?
The next few days went by without a problem, although it continued to snow and another blizzard was about to blow through. From time to time I’d see one of the other cats going about, but they always seemed to be busy.
On the day of December 30 I saw a news report concerning the disappearance of dogs, both pets and strays, since the start of the bad weather. I had a pretty good idea now of who was behind that.
And on New Year’s Eve the stranger arrived.
The morning of New Year’s Eve had been a pretty one, with a bright sunrise bejeweling the frosty countryside. But by late afternoon the clouds had built up again and the wind had come ahowling, and a blizzard was again upon us as the last of the daylight began to fade.
I was out looking into the teeth of the wind when I heard the gunshot.
I’d been on the porch with Snowball because we were both concerned about Frisky. Frisky seemed to be Snowball’s special friend. But she had not returned after going outside that afternoon, and I wondered if she’d gotten caught in the storm.
But immediately following the gunshot, I saw the little tiger-striped Frisky come racing across the yard, as best she could in the deep snow, and she shot into the house as if propelled from the gun itself.
Now what was someone doing out there hunting in the storm?
“Hello!” I hollered into the wind and the waning light. “Hello!”
“Where’s that (blankity-blank) vermin?” came the reply, but even that short sentence consisted of huffing and puffing, and hinted at near derangement. “Where are you?” he called again, only this time I felt that the yell was aimed at me.
“At the church!”
“What church? Where am I? I can’t see!”
“I’ll have to get him,” I turned to say to Snowball, but he had returned inside. Though I had been suitably outfitted to stand on the porch in the cold, I required more gear to go out to retrieve the stranger. I hunted down my boots and put on my heavy coat, then wisely took the roll of twine from the broom closet and tied one end to the porch rail.
It was hard going as I slowly unrolled the twine and walked out into the storm. After only a few yards, I too could no longer see the church, and my hopes of finding the stranger were nil. Unless…
“Fire your weapon into the sky! I can’t find you!”
A sharp report went off no more than ten feet to my left, and in moments I found the stranger. He was lying on his back, his teeth chattering uncontrollably. I fairly lifted him off the ground, immodestly congratulating myself on my strength, and helped him back to the church and into my living room.
The gun I left out in the cold.
I had a roaring fire going and a large mug of hot chocolate in the stranger’s hand before I tried to ask him any questions. Strangely, all of the cats, even Snowball, had seemed to go into hiding, for I had seen not one since the stranger had arrived.
“I’m Reverend Dawson. What is your name?” I asked. “And what were you hunting in such a frightful storm?”
“My name is Jeff,” he said. “And I was hunting the most frightening animal that men have ever faced. An animal that I created. I have to kill them.” He was talking to me and yet not talking to me, as if this were some mantra he had told himself over and over again.
“Something you created? Would you care to elaborate?”
He told me an amazing story.
He had been a bioengineer, and he had been trying to create a species of cat that would remain small and cute like a kitten for years. In this he had been successful, except that he’d forgotten that mammals go through a stage of exceptional learning ability when they are young, and his kittens were permanently locked into that stage until they finally grew up near the end of their days, bred, and died.
“The first was named ‘Puff.’ Brilliant cat. Had a run-in with a vicious neighborhood dog that had even once attacked my daughter. I’d never been able to kill the dog myself. He built a trap out in the woods with a carving knife from the kitchen and a clever snare. But he used my daughter to bait the trap, lured her out into the woods when he knew the dog was out there.”
That had been some years ago, I discovered. Since then Puff had bred with other cats, and now they had multiplied to Lord only knew what numbers.
Despite the nature of the story, I didn’t tell him about Snowball and the others.
“And you have been hunting these cats ever since?”
“Yes. I found a whole slew of them holed up in a warehouse not far from here. I burned the place to the ground. But somehow they escaped—I was only able to find a few bodies. ”
So that explained the advent of Snowball. They’d been fleeing a warehouse fire set by this man.
The phone rang. I excused myself and went to answer in the kitchen. It was my son, calling from Australia to wish his father a happy new year. We talked briefly, but joyfully, and I wished him luck in his quest. Then I wondered about my visitor. What was his family doing tonight? Where was this daughter he had been so eager to protect, at this moment?
And then I noticed that the silverware drawer was ajar. I opened it fully. All of the knives were gone.
I hurried back out of the kitchen. Fortunately, Jeff was all right. I resettled myself but I kept an eye out for the cats. “So where is your family tonight, Jeff?”
“Home. At least I think so. My wife divorced me a few years ago.”