Originally published in Lovecraft’s Disciples issue 35, from Rainfall Records Press
Any saner mind would find this illogical and impracticable, but the following is the truth, and here it is.
It was a blaring, oppressive day in August. I remember I spent the morning trying to write a rather dull article about plant cuttings for the Home and Gardening section of some newspaper which shall remain nameless — I don’t suppose a publication would take too kindly to being associated with the name of a madman, so I shall omit the title — in any case, by one o’clock on that fateful Monday I became tired enough and sufficiently at a loose end to take some air in the garden.
Having moved into the house only a fortnight ago — it was a two-up, two-down, terraced “starter” home — the state of the garden was less of a well-tended lawn and some shrubs and more of a neglected compost heap. The previous tenants, who shall also remain anonymous, for different reasons, embarrassment being chiefly among them, had taken to throwing waste matter — vegetation or otherwise — through their back door, and had not taken it upon themselves to clear any of it away before my arrival.
It was a veritable wasteland straight out of Jules Verne; rollicking hillocks of putrefied grass cuttings, hedge trimmings, a rotting log which may have been a tree pitilessly sawn down, litter a-crawling with large red ants, all with hedgehogs and vermin nesting in their foetid depths, clouds of midges rising and dancing in the ominous sticky air.
Perhaps the sun disorientated me, but it was only when I walked to the bottom of the festering pile and stood still between the hillocks — some of which were as high as my own self — that I realised my garden lay Haunted.
It was not a normal haunting, Dickens-style. This was a Haunting. A sense of deep-set paranoia, an idea that I was being watched by an intelligence greater and colder than the mind could fathom, that solidified into the sick knowledge that yes, someone was watching me — not just watching but seeing, their preying eyes penetrating beneath skin and bone into my essence, who not only saw me, but knew me, in one glance. I felt it then: a prickling down my spine, and I turned to face the Attention.
There was nothing to be seen. Grass, leaves, refuse, gnats. The sensation lessened somewhat, and I faced forwards again.
Now I beheld the cat, sitting on the fence.
The first thing which heightened my sense of discomfort was the hatred wrought in the cat’s eyes. Amber hatred and yellow disdain. All directed at me — why?
It only occurred to me (as I retreated into the kitchen and boiled the kettle with shaking hands, to steady my nerves) that I had been standing directly between the Cat and the Attention. I had felt the Attention concentrated from a point behind my own person. Perhaps the Cat supposed me to be in the way? Perhaps whatever hatred I detected in its headlamp eyes was aimed at whatever presence I sensed behind me? Perhaps, perhaps.
Which led me to wondering whom, in fact, did the Cat belong to? As Kipling said, “a Cat walks by his wild lone, and all places are alike to him.” Evidently my garden was the exception to this rule. I shall explain.
That night the oppressive heat did not dwindle, and the air maintained a tension which spoke of electrical storms. I did not sleep well. I tossed and turned from one side to the other until the bells of Long Surrey sounded the midnight hour, and I at last sank into a difficult limbo between dreams and waking.
In my dreams a shadowy presence slithered after me — whether my own silhouette or no — preparing itself to reach out and seize me by the shoulder, to spin me about and cause a confrontation I was not certain I liked to have — for who wants to confront himself in a dream? — when I suddenly woke into a blurred daze.
I could feel it again!
The Attention was there, in my room. It was behind me once more, despite my being in a horizontal state on a mattress. I levered my body into a sitting position. It was still lurking there, radiating malcontent from behind my back — I looked — nothing there but the dark knots in the wood of the headboard, and the painted wall behind that.
I remembered an article I had read in a scientific journal weeks before, concerning the nature of some particles being sentient, which caused them to react to human consciousness. I forget the mechanisms of such a theory, but in the near blackness I fancied those knots shifted and twitched. Therefore I let my gaze slide off the headboard for fear of the marks working themselves into a phantasm, such as a face or a devil, and my eyes rested on a sliver of moonlight on the carpet. I had neglected to close the curtains properly.
Realising this, I rose to rectify the matter, and chancing to peer through the aperture before sealing it shut, I met eyes with the fiend. The Cat crouched on the fence opposite my bedroom window now, staring in at the wall behind my bed, staring, staring with its amber lamps.
I tugged the curtains over this monstrosity, but its gaze was seared into my retina, and I did not retire to bed again that night. I resolved to buy a tomcat alarm the next morning. Perhaps Armitage’s Eldritch Obscurities would stock such an item.
Armitage’s was a new pet shop which had opened at the end of my road. It was small, and sold, among other things, electric eels, albino badgers, horned foxes, monochrome chameleons and sentient cacti. There were no tomcat alarms, to my disappointment, but I spent the morning viewing the establishment as an excuse not to go home and feel my spirit pinioned between a Cat’s stare and a horrific non-entity.
The clerk had the enthusiasm and affability to show me around, beginning with the white mice which transformed into milk when they sensed a predator, and rounding off with a brief tour of the flowers that opened and serenaded the invisible sun through the ceiling in the morning, at noon, and at sunset.
I did not hear them sing, deciding instead to retreat homeward for lunch after all — but before I took my departure, I enquired of the clerk whether he had sold a cat of late.
He replied in affirmation. A wildcat cross-breed, a large one with amber eyes, had been purchased. The clerk mentioned that he was glad to be rid of the animal at last.
“Why is that?” I asked.
“It had a peculiar trick. A mental influence. It shivered your spine to turn around and catch him eyeing you, I can tell you that.”
“Trick?”
The clerk pressed his lips together and refused to explain the matter further.
A week later, the owner of the Cat introduced himself to me. Knowing, as I did, that such people as Charles Dickens and Christopher Smart had felines of note, I was of the opinion that I was under the scrutiny of the Cat of a Master, though I feared from the nature of the Cat that it would not belong to a benevolent authority. He was not benevolent. Nor was he malignant. The Cat belonged to Old Tom.
Old Tom — the gentleman residing in the house next to mine — was not old in an aged way, being, at the least, forty, but old in the crusty, curmudgeonly fashion which I am told is common in single men of a certain age and disposition. He did not know of the moniker by which locals in Long Surrey referred to him — the “Old” being a dark witticism among the types of folk who deigned to talk about the man. He never chose to speak to any living organism — I had thought him to be an elective mute — until the Cat.
On a misty morning at the start of September, I chanced an excursion into the back garden to take in the washing (having accidentally left it out on the line overnight — all right, I lie — I had not dared to venture outside the day before due to the Cat staring at me with its amber pinprick eyes) when I saw the little animal crouching once more upon the fence, inexorable, and something inside me snapped. The sounds of birds overhead and traffic on the road behind the house muted to a dull roaring in my brain as I searched among the weeds — something brushed my skin and seemed to burn me, but I paid it no heed –- found a discarded brick and made ready to hurl it at the creature, despite what my grandmother said concerning the misfortunes of people who stone strays.
As I crept closer to my ill-fated target, I tensed, expecting the Attention to materialise behind me and seize me by the scruff of the neck. It was absent, but another occurrence caused me to halt. The Cat gave a pleased wriggle, squeezed its eyes shut — thus cutting off the stare that had maddened me so — in an expression of haughty amusement, and began to purr.
“You needn’t rattle your ribs at me,” I began to say, disgusted by this reaction, when someone interrupted me.
“Henry!” A roughened, weathered voice erupted from the other side of the fence. “Get down from there. You’ll catch your death!”
The Cat — Henry — opened its eyes, shot me one last blazing ocular insult and sprang out of sight. In its place, Old Tom’s face appeared, and observed the state I stood in: wild, hair matted with grass clippings, insane perspiration on my brow, gritted teeth, scorched by acute nettle stings, with a brick in my hand.
I nodded. “Good morning.”
The man whom I had taken for a misanthrope invited me into his home, having the distinct notion that leaving a man to suffer with nettle rash, whilst in possession of a First Aid kit, was not an honourable decision.
Throughout the entire amateur medical procedure the Cat — I refuse to call it Henry, I had a cousin called Henry who would be appalled to be associated with such a vile being — anyhow, the Cat curled itself upon the kitchen table and watched my every flinch and wince, the end of its tail flicking in a meditative fashion. I fancy that if it had the physical and mental capability to write, it would be composing notes for a thesis on the human suffering. As it was, it had to commit such details to memory and suffice with that.
“Have you had it long?” I asked Old Tom.
“What?”
I nodded at the feline. “That.”
“Oh, no. Henry followed me home on the boat from Calais. I travelled there for my summer holidays. Think it was June. Clever cat. Knew who I was in a crowd of passengers and evaded detection. Don’t you suppose that’s something, for an animal?”
“I didn’t think animals were allowed to be taken across country borders?”
“Maybe, but a cat on a ship is lucky, and I am lucky to have him. Since Helen passed…I don’t want to bore you…but Henry provides more company than she ever did. Enough company for two men.”
His words caused me a whisper of unease.
“Often, I almost feel there’s someone there, in the same room as me, watching over everything I do. I turn round twice, and he stalks in at last, meowing. It’s comforting.”
“Comforting” was not the term that I would use to describe the Attention — for, I thought, the Attention was what Old Tom must have been proselytising about. I recall wishing the Cat would not be so considerate as to take its damned Attention with it whenever it chanced upon me or I upon it. It upset my nerves, as the near fatality of the brick incident proved.
“Why were you delving around in a nettle patch, anyhow?” Old Tom enquired and regarded me from beneath stern eyebrows. “Is a brick so important?”
A quiver of guilt. Had the man suspected my intentions? I muttered my thanks and excuses, and left.
The following day I passed Armitage’s and discovered it had become an electrical store selling white goods, and, oddly, tomcat alarms. I purchased one. It proved ineffective.
However, remembering Old Tom’s tale of the Cat’s origins, combined with this occurrence and the distinct recollection I had of the interview with the affable shop clerk, were the next things which caused me to doubt my precarious sanity.
This change in my mental health was unprecedented. I have all the imagination and creative skills of a doorknob — why was I in these circumstances now? It was all the wretched Cat’s fault. I wanted it dead as a doornail, strung up and hung out to dry. But how? I couldn’t kill a living creature in cold blood; I was and never have been that manner of character.
I began to experience wonderful nightmares and waking dreams of the oddly sweet variety involving the Cat being driven over, or stuck up a chimney, or burning in Hell. I was never the perpetrator. It was always the Cat’s fault. Perhaps it was too distracted by whatever lay behind the driver, behind the tree, or beyond Beelzebub. Its Attention was the only nightmare all of us, I was certain, could do without. I am prepared to tolerate an animal glancing up in the silence of a Sunday afternoon and viewing something cross the room which isn’t there — all perfectly healthy in a normal cat — but this Cat’s Attention was the exception. It bored directly through my soul and sickened me so that I scarcely ate or slept.
I was bedridden for a week, on the advice of my family doctor who diagnosed me with nervous tension, the same malady my grandmother suffered while I was a young boy.
Following on from a particularly delirious dream in which the Cat’s head was propped on my mantelpiece while its body still tiptoed around me, I was disturbed enough to ratchet myself out of bed and take myself for a walk — not far, only to the end of the road and back again, to check the electrical store had not changed into something else — when who should I come across but Old Tom?
“How have you been?” he asked me, looking. “You seem peaky.”
“I am absolutely fine,” I told him. “Your fiend — er, your little friend — still keeping you company?” I had almost, though not quite, become used to the presence of the Cat’s Attention. I had sensed it trailing a cold digit up my spine as I dressed to go out, but had not bothered myself with looking out of the window. I knew the Cat would be there, on the fence, like Eternity.
Therefore I was…taken badly…when my neighbour replied with melancholy, “No. He’s gone. The milkman knocked him over, six o’clock on Tuesday morning. He’s dead.”
“Oh.” I was rapidly losing mental momentum, wondering if the milk spilled, then thinking there was no point — no point at all, do you see? — crying over it as they were only mice, pretending. What I managed to articulate was, “Ironic, wouldn’t you say?” and after this unwise remark I fainted.
When I came to, I was no longer sure of what day it was, or what o’clock, or what I had been doing. I looked through the nurses and doctors and other patients on my ward and kept blathering about consciousness and conscience, Attention and distraction, until even I no longer knew what topic I was trying so hard to inform the world at large so thoroughly about. The news a nurse brought me of Old Tom’s passing away of a cardiac arrest warranted my being sedated for three hours. She had taken me for a relative of Tom’s and brought forth a lawyer on my second groggy awakening, Tom’s lawyer. He read me part of Tom’s Will.
The clause pertaining to me stated, “And I hereby bequeath my cat, Henry, to my good neighbour Maximilian, should one of us die.”
The Director of the institution I am now staying at is normally an agreeable man, though he assures me that at this point I attempted to attack the solicitor, scratched his face with my nails and tried to imbibe the legal document; I do not remember. Then, he informs me, I returned to a “vegetative state” glaring through every person who was willing to talk to me, including my brother.
I can see right through the Director. But I was not looking through them. It was the Attention, not me.
A footnote I should like to add to this, to conclude my sentiments, is this: I am told by a schizophrenic ex-art historian — who is in the room next to mine — that my case puts him in mind of the painter Louis Wain; but nothing, not even lithium, would put me in the mood for drawing felines. I cannot abide them. I would sooner die and reincarnate as a milkman than look at a picture of one of the hairy little beasts.
Nightwalks 