It took a while for the boy to stop crying. Giovanni yawned five times and left as the sun began setting. The breeze chilled rapidly.
The boy had recovered to the point where he could talk to the girl again.
“Mrs. Mackowick said sorry for everything and gave me a little money for both of us. Now I don’t have to worry. I can buy all the chocolate scones I want and even more plain ones. Oh, it’s so hard to choose. I can’t decide!” she cried out.
She stared down at the rectangular piece of paper in her hand, looking gloomier by the second.
“I guess there’s no such thing as no worries,” she sighed.
“Thank you for staying. I’m fine now,” the boy grumbled.
They walked away together. I didn’t follow them.
Instead, I went back to my usual resting place and slept. The next day, I returned to my patrol. Giovanni and Cole found me sleeping on the wall and asked if I’d gotten bored. I didn’t answer.
“For sure, that crybaby could never be a devil,” Giovanni said.
“Crying isn’t the same as weakness,” I argued.
“You know something you’re not sharing with us?” Cole asked.
“No. But I don’t think there’s any need to watch him.”
The king came home the next day. The cats’ fears subsided, and Ulthar was peaceful once more.
The rest of the summer passed without event. The sunlight dimmed, and it became fall. As the season turned, our thoughts switched to winter once again.
I saw the boy around from time to time, generally once a day. He still didn’t like cats, but apparently the girl and her friends had become used to this. The other children accepted his strangeness, possibly thanks to Mackowick. Crying after an encounter with that old man counted as a rite of passage among them.
Mackowick’s stepson had come to town, but not only had he failed to kill his stepfather, he hadn’t even hurt the man. His behavior toward his family was perfect, and after a brief stay he went back to the city. I suppose his future was promising, and Ulthar was all in the past.
Mackowick kept his word and never went jogging again. He’d also begun drinking less.
That was all of Ulthar’s worthwhile news. I could discuss how Tika’s girl used up the extra money inside of a week and got a scolding from her parents, but it’s not terribly interesting.
Then, as the nights grew longer, the unsettling thing I’d been waiting for arrived.
It was no devil, but something every bit as horrifying came racing into Ulthar.
That particular evening, I was in the boy’s house.
Well, in a tree behind the house. I’d heard a violent racket, like a landside, from some distance away. Approaching, I saw light slicing through the darkness.
It was a car, driving at speeds rarely seen in Ulthar.
The stone-paved streets clearly didn’t make for the smoothest of rides. The house’s back door opened, and the boy came running out. He didn’t appear surprised by the racket; he actually seemed to be expecting this. I’d heard him answer the phone a few days before, while his mother was out. The boy had spoken to a man on the other end of the line, discussing a time to meet. This was that time.
The boy wore a sweater far too heavy for the season—likely these were travel clothes. If he’d anticipated their journey, he was probably pretty bright for a human.
Or maybe the man in the car had told him what to wear.
The car tore through the streets of Ulthar. Its flashy red color really drew the eye. The car had no roof, which made no sense to me. It looked nothing like any of the cars I was used to seeing in this town. Some people apparently owned cars designed for pleasure, not practicality. They were the types of cars only people with covered garages (a favorite cat hiding place) could have. The types of cars wealthy people owned.
But this car wasn’t shiny, like most rich people’s possessions. It was dented all over and rather dirty. Had the driver been careless and left it outside? Several large bags waited in the back seat, but I was most concerned by the man behind the wheel. Wealthy people never looked as desperate as he did.
This was the face of a man running from something, yet no one was chasing him. Or perhaps only he could see his pursuers. I thought the latter option seemed fairly likely.
The car stopped behind the house where the boy waited. The moment he saw the man in the car, he yelled, “Dad!”
The man didn’t answer. He opened the passenger side door, beckoning to the boy.
The mother realized something was wrong; I could hear her calling the boy’s name from inside, but she was too late. The boy got in the car, and the man drove off.
The car tore out of Ulthar. It roared along a winding mountain road, one that would take them far away.
When the car had stopped at the boy’s house, I’d jumped down between the bags in the backseat. I’d landed upside down but had managed to quickly right myself. Fortunately, neither the man nor the boy had noticed.
“Dad! Dad! You came!” the boy said, excited.
The man nodded, pretty worked up. “Yeah! I came. I really did.”
“I-I’ve been waiting. I knew! You aren’t drinking! You can drive and everything!”
“That’s right. Don’t worry. I said it would be fine.”
“I didn’t tell Mum. I knew she’d never believe, but if this goes well we can go back and convince her!”
“You can’t trust her!” the man said.
The car bucked, and not because of the bumpy road. The man punched the steering wheel.
“They… They’re all out to get me! They locked me up! No way to treat a man… I’m not letting the same thing happen to you!”
“But Dad—”
“Shut up! This is for your own good!”
He backhanded the boy across the face.
In a car this loud, it was amazing how silent everything could become.
I could clearly smell that particular scent coming from the boy.
“Dad… You aren’t better, are you? Did you run away from the hospital?”
The man didn’t bother answering. The boy clutched his arm.
“Dad. Dad! You can’t do that. Mum said you were going to get better!”
“Shut up,” he growled, glaring at the boy.
I was watching this conversation in the car’s mirror. That little surface couldn’t reflect the whole of the man’s face, but I could read his every expression.
“I told you not to trust that bitch!” the man barked.
“You shouldn’t talk about Mum like that…”
“Why can’t you understand?”
“I wanna go home! Can we go back?”
The kid twisted away, but the car was going very fast. He could jump out if he wanted, but he’d almost certainly die.
So the man didn’t try to grab him. He snorted, hands shaking.
But then the boy said something that changed everything.
“If you run from everything bad, there’ll be nowhere left to go.”
The man gasped.
“So let’s go back. Come on,” the boy said.
At the boy’s plea, the man let out a long sigh.
And then he muttered, “Are you really my kid? Are you?”
“Dad?”
“It’s not some sort of trick? She lied to me a lot. Maybe you’re a lie, too. Get better? There’s nothing wrong with me. Everyone lies to me! That woman, you, the doctors, the cops—”
That particular smell surrounded this man, too.
There is one universal truth: Nothing is better than being a cat.
All cats believe that to be true.
Humans didn’t think like that. They lived precarious lives, shielding their delicate hearts. Often, they grew too feeble to do even that.
I could smell this man’s heart breaking.
In the back seat, I moved on top of the bags and waited for my moment.
I was probably going to die. I wasn’t sure this was worth sacrificing my life. I wasn’t the king. I had no way of knowing what a meaningful death was.
But I was a cat. I ruled over anything weaker than me. And in my domain, I wouldn’t allow that intolerable odor of pain.
The road twisted like a snake. The car slowed. I waited for it to make a big turn to the right, then jumped from the back seat and landed on the man’s head.
No matter how fast the man reacted, to my cat’s instincts he was slow as an inchworm. I jabbed my claws in the man’s eye. The car turned over onto its side, and I was thrown out.
I don’t know what happened after that. My body hit something, or something hit my body. A deep, deep darkness enveloped me.
When winter came to Ulthar, I rolled over on Miss Margot’s knees, spending my afternoon telling her where to pet me. She was moving about less than she had a year ago, but the blanket on her knees still smelled good, and she talked ad nauseum. Today she was telling me all about her great-grandchildren.
“Yes, just like that! The whole time, talking about things I couldn’t follow in the slightest. But that’s fine. Instead of buying toys I don’t know, it’s so much easier to give them money. It makes them so happy.”
Miss Margot knew life was full of things one understood and things one did not. For a human, she wasn’t a bad conversationalist.
Then Margot suddenly jumped, though not enough to knock me off her lap.
I looked down and saw a ball at her feet. One of the children playing in the vacant lot had missed a throw. Margot picked it up, and one of the children came over to get it.
“Sorry, ma’am.”
“Be careful, now. Don’t throw it in the road. The bus goes by here,” she said.
“I know.”
It was that boy.
The girl came running up behind him. She seemed more interested in petting me than in the ball. I allowed her to rub my belly.
As they went back to their friends, I heard them talking.
“That cat’s all better now,” the girl said.
“Looks like. Forgot all about his injuries, the lazy thing.”
“You brought him back, Matthew?”
“I found him lying by the road after the accident,” the boy said.
“I thought you hated cats.”
The boy stopped and looked back at me.
He thought about it for a moment.
“I do hate cats. But cats are everywhere here. I can’t run away from them all, and I don’t want to.”
I didn’t really get it. Maybe that boy had grown a tail.
Come to think of it, I hadn’t died. I still wasn’t on my sixth.
My nose hadn’t changed, so I wasn’t sure if that heartache smell had really gone away.
Neither Ulthar nor the universe had changed.
But there was no hurry. No matter how fast you ran, your troublesome tail would follow.
That was good. So I napped in my familiar spot and enjoyed my time in Ulthar to the fullest.
The End