The black cat curled up in the strange soft material that now lay on the ground. Last night the bed had looked like one of his kind, only much larger. A giant cat with an arched back among strange figures of unknown creatures on the lawn. The orange balls with grimacing faces still sat on the steps, no longer glowing. The sun was warm, a relief from the nights now longer and cooler.
“P..s..t.., get out of here.” A large woman with a rake loomed over him. “P..s..t.” The old sound. Well known by the cat. The sound he had instinctively learned meant bad, scat, bolt. The woman spoke to a man raking leaves nearby. “It’s that damned black cat, the one with the stumpy tail. Sleeping in one of the blow-ups. Probably been hanging around the bird feeder too.” The cat ran off.
Food was getting harder to find. In the little green space where families sat and children played on swings, bits of meat were easy to find in the hot times. Sometimes people threw pieces to him when he crept into the open. Today there was no one in the green space. The cat knew he had to get to the street with many fast-moving things. He made his way through yards and over fences. He had his favourite spots but the best meant he had to cross where the fast things came and went and sometimes made a shrieking noise at him.
Today he was lucky. A girl coming out of one of the food places stopped when she saw him lurking under a patio table. “Poor kitty.” She stopped and opened her bag and broke off a large morsel and threw it to him. He grabbed it and ran behind the building. Meat with many tastes. Like eating grass mixed with unknown plants. Still, meat.
The cat spent the afternoon roaming to other food places. He watched a flock of small brown birds that also hung around the food places. He tried to catch one of them pecking something on the ground but had no luck. The bird remained wary while eating.
By early evening he was still hungry. The people were leaving the food places and the cat wanted to find its way back to the quieter places and find somewhere to sleep. He had luck crossing back to his usual haunts. Daylight was fading as he trotted along a sidewalk. A couple of slow-moving fast things passed by but did not shriek at him. Another stopped a little ahead of him and two people stepped out. They were dressed in the same dark clothes. The cat smelled meat. “Good kitty. It’s all right.” He deked under a bush.
But the smell of the meat was enticing and he was so hungry. He crept from the bush towards the spot on a lawn where the meat had been set. He was aware of the man and the woman standing quietly several feet back from the meat and he was confident in his ability to snatch and run. He had done that many times before. He lunged at the prize but was surprised that it seemed rooted to the ground and, in the second he made an effort to secure it, he was trapped as if in a giant spider web. Though he thrashed and spat, he was dumped into a small cage. He heard a door click shut.
“Got him at last,” said one of his captors to the other.
“Not a moment too early with Hallowe’en tomorrow.”
Through a little slot the cat saw himself being loaded into a moving thing.
The cat remembered he had been in a moving thing before when he was very young. He was with another of his kind who looked like him in a similar cage They seemed to be there for a long time before the moving thing stopped and the man came and took the cage, letting it sway as he walked so that his litter mate and he fell to one corner.
He did not remember what the man and woman said.
“Do we have to do this?”
“Nobody wants a black cat,” the man replied.
“It seems so cruel.”
“You were the one who would not let me drown them from the beginning. That’s what we always did on the farm. You said give them a chance. This is a chance. We’ve kept them too long. Look at you. Get a grip.”
The man opened the box and dumped the cats into a ditch. The woman and the man left.
The cat did not remember learning to hunt or the day the other cat was hit by a noisy moving thing and could not follow him anymore. He did remember the cage and the man and he learned to stay hidden even as he gradually found himself back in territory with many people.
The cat had spent a first winter under porches, always hungry, learning to stalk the small birds where they gathered to eat. But that was after the worst time. The time like now. When the days were getting shorter and the nights colder and the leaves were falling from the trees and he first saw the strange things that glowed on the lawns. The worst time was the night when many little people roamed the streets from house to house and some bigger people saw him and cornered him and one put him in a soft cage and flung him over his shoulder.
“This will make our gathering complete. Tell the others. See you all at the Devil’s Den.”
There were thirteen invited friends at the party. The cat knew nothing of Hallowe’en, of Medieval beliefs that black cats were witches in disguise, that women said to be witches were burned at a stake or drowned to prove their innocence, that their cats were tortured. In truth, those gathered knew little of the history either. They said they were having a black mass. This meant they had lit a fire under the iron kettle used for boiling maple sap, now referred to as the cauldron. They stood in a circle around it, drinking beer, some raising their free hand in the sign of the horns. Two of the girls, clustered together, spoke in low and frightened tones. A third girl danced with abandon flinging her hair and stripped to her bare breasts despite the chill of the night. Everyone was dressed in black in a motley assortment of hoodies and trench coats. A couple of males braved the cool night in black band shirts. A tall thin male completely in black and with a black cape strode around the circle, shouting, “Ave Satanas. Everyone. Ave Satanas” until a few joined in. The cauldron was filled with rotting leaves and murky waters from the fall rains. The dancing girl threw in some incense and turned from the fire.
“I need life force. It is time for the cat.”
The male in the black cape brought the sack from the shack. He was unsteady on his feet as he held the squirming animal aloft by its tale. One of the two frightened girls screamed, “Don’t. Don’t.” Others chanted, “Kill the devil” or “Kill for the devil.” Another male with a butcher knife gave a vicious slash at the cat, severing a large part of its tail. The cat dropped to the ground and ran into the deeper woods.
The cat remembered hanging in the air and the pain in his tail and falling to the ground and running away. The cat did not know what else went on after he escaped. Nor did he understand the chanting. “Kill the witch. Kill the bitch.” He understood screams and fear.
Now the moving thing was stopped. The cat heard the man and the woman stepping out and coming to the rear door. Inside was now pitch black. The cat cowered in the back of the cage.
