The Collective Page 5

the Tri-Dormal-G testing program twenty years ago. They enjoyed

  teasing me, baiting me with it." He looked at Halston grimly. "But

  they paid."

  In mid-May, Gage had gotten up to set breakfast and found

  Amanda Drogan lying at the foot of the main stairs in a litter of

  broken crockery and Little Friskies. Her eyes bulged sightlessly up

  at the ceiling. She had bled a great deal from the mouth and nose.

  Her back was broken, both legs were broken, and her neck had

  been literally shattered like glass.

  "It slept in her room," Drogan said. "She treated it like a baby ...'Is

  oo hungwy, darwing? Does oo need to go out and do poopoos!'

  Obscene, coming from an old baffle-ax like my sister. I think it

  woke her up, meowing. She got his dish. She used to say that Sam

  didn't really like his Friskies unless they were wetted down with a

  little milk. So she was planning to go downstairs. The cat was

  rubbing against her legs. She was old, not too steady on her feet.

  Half asleep. They got to the head of the stairs and the cat got in

  front of her ... tripped her .. ."

  Yes, it could have happened that way, Halston thought. In his

  mind's eye he saw the old woman falling forward and outward, too

  shocked to scream. The Friskies spraying out as she tumbled head

  over heels to the bottom, the bowl smashing. At last she comes to

  rest at the bottom, the old bones shattered, the eyes glaring, the

  nose and ears trickling blood. And the purring cat begins to work

  its way down the stairs, contentedly munching Little Friskies ...

  "What did the coroner say?" he asked Drogan. "Death by accident,

  of course. But I knew."

  "Why didn't you get rid of the cat then? With Amanda gone?"

  Because Carolyn Broadmoor had threatened to leave if he did,

  apparently. She was hysterical, obsessed with the subject. She was

  a sick woman, and she was nutty on the subject of spiritualism. A

  Hartford medium had told her (for a mere twenty dollars) that

  Amanda's soul had entered Sam's feline body. Sam had been

  Amanda's, she told Drogan, and if Sam went, she went.

  Halston, who had become something of an expert at reading

  between the lines of human lives, suspected that Drogan and the

  old Broadmoor bird had been lovers long ago, and the old dude

  was reluctant to let her go over a cat.

  "It would have been the same as suicide," Drogan said. "In her

  mind she was still a wealthy woman, perfectly capable of packing

  up that cat and going to New York or London or even Monte Carlo

  with it. In fact she was the last of a great family, living on a

  pittance as a result of a number of bad investments in the sixties.

  She lived on the second floor here in a specially controlled,

  superhumidified room. The woman was seventy, Mr. Halston. She

  was a heavy smoker until the last two years of her life, and the

  emphysema was very bad. I wanted her here, and if the cat had to

  stay ..."

  Halston nodded and then glanced meaningfully at his watch.

  "Near the end of June, she died in the night. The doctor seemed to

  take it as a matter of course ... just came and wrote out the death

  certificate and that was the end of it. But the cat was in the room.

  Gage told me."

  "We all have to go sometime, man," Halston said.

  "Of course. That's what the doctor said. But I knew. I remembered.

  Cats like to get babies and old people when they're asleep. And

  steal their breath."

  "An old wives' tale."

  "Based on fact, like most so-called old wives' tales," Drogan

  replied.

  "Cats like to knead soft things with their paws, you see. A pillow, a

  thick shag rug... or a blanket. A crib blanket or an old person's

  blanket. The extra weight on a person who's weak to start with ..."

  Drogan trailed off, and Halston thought about it. Carolyn

  Broadmoor asleep in her bedroom, the breath rasping in and out of

  her damaged lungs, the sound nearly lost in the whisper of special

  humidifiers and air conditioners. The cat with the queer black-and-

  white markings leaps silently onto her spinster's bed and stares at

  her old and wrinkle-grooved face with those lambent, black-and-

  green eyes. It creeps onto her thin chest and settles its weight there,

  purring.., and the breathing slows ... slows ... and the cat purrs as

  the old woman slowly smothers beneath its weight on her chest.

  He was not an imaginative man, but Halston shivered a little.

  "Drogan," he said, continuing to stroke the purring cat. "Why don't

  you just have it put away? A vet would give it the gas for twenty

  dollars."

  Drogan said, "The funeral was on the first day of July, I had

  Carolyn buried in our cemetery plot next to my sister. The way she

  would have wanted it. On July third I called Gage to this room and

  handed him a wicker basket.., a picnic hamper sort of thing. Do

  you know what I mean?"

  Halston nodded.

  "I told him to put the cat in it and take it to a vet in Milford and

  have it put to sleep. He said, 'Yes, sir,' took the basket, and went

  out. Very like him. I never saw him alive again. There was an

  accident on the turnpike. The Lincoln was driven into a bridge

  abutment at better than sixty miles an hour. Dick Gage was killed

  instantly. When they found him there were scratches on his face."

  Halston was silent as the picture of how it might have been formed

  in his brain again. No sound in the room but the peaceful crackle of

  the fire and the peaceful purr of the cat in his lap. He and the cat

  together before the fire would make a good illustration for that

  Edgar Guest poem, the one that goes: "The cat on my lap, the

  hearth's good fire/ ... A happy man, should you enquire."

  Dick Gage moving the Lincoln down the turnpike toward Milford,

  beating the speed limit by maybe five miles an hour. The wicker

  basket beside him - a picnic hamper sort of thing. The chauffeur is

  watching traffic, maybe he's passing a big cab-over Jimmy and he

  doesn't notice the peculiar black-on-one-side, white-on-the-other

  face that pokes out of one side of the basket. Out of the driver's

  side. He doesn't notice because he's passing the big trailer truck

  and that's when the cat jumps onto his face, spitting and clawing,

  its talons raking into one eye, puncturing it, deflating it, blinding it.

  Sixty and the hum of the Lincoln's big motor and the other paw is

  hooked over the bridge of the nose, digging in with exquisite,

  damning pain - maybe the Lincoln starts to veer right, into the path

  of the Jimmy, and its airhorn blares ear-shatteringly, but Gage can't

  hear it because the cat is yowling, the cat is spread-eagled over his

  face like some huge furry black spider, ears laid back, green eyes

  glaring like spotlights from hell, back legs jittering and digging

  into the soft flesh of the old man's neck. The car veers wildly back

  the other way. The bridge abutment looms. The cat jumps down

  and the Lincoln, a shiny black torpedo, hits the cement and goes up

  like a bomb.

  Halston swallowed hard and heard a dry c
lick in his throat. "And

  the cat came back?"

  Drogan nodded. "A week later. On the day Dick Gage was buried,

  as a matter of fact. Just like the old song says. The cat came back."

  "It survived a car crash at sixty? Hard to believe."

  "They say each one has nine lives. When it comes back ... that's

  when I started to wonder if it might not be a...a..."

  "Hellcat?" Halston suggested softly.

  "For want of a better word, yes. A sort of demon sent ..."

  "To punish you."

  "I don't know. But I'm afraid of it. I feed it, or rather, the woman

  who comes in to do for me feeds it. She doesn't like it either. She

  says that face is a curse of God. Of course, she's local." The old

  man tried to smile and failed. "I want you to kill it. I've lived with

  it for the last four months. It skulks around in the shadows. It looks

  at me. It seems to be ... waiting. I lock myself in my room every

  night and still I wonder if I'm going to wake up one early and find

  it ... curled up on my chest ... and purring."

  The wind whined lonesomely outside and made a strange hooting

  noise in the stone chimney.

  "At last I got in touch with Saul Loggia. He recommended you. He

  called you a stick, I believe."

  "A one-stick. That means I work on my own."

  "Yes. He said you'd never been busted, or even suspected. He said

  you always seem to land on your feet.... like a cat."

  Halston looked at the old man in the wheelchair. And his long-

  fingered, muscular hands were lingering above the cat's neck.

  "I'll do it now, if you want me to," he said softly. "I'll snap its neck.

  It won't even know-"

  "No!" Drogan cried. He drew in a long, shuddering breath. Color

  had come up in his sallow cheeks. "Not... not here. Take it away."

  Halston smiled humorlessly. He began to stroke the sleeping cat's

  head and shoulders and back very gently again. "All right," he said.

  "I accept the contract. Do you want the body?"

  "No. Kill it. Bury it." He paused. He hunched forward in the

  wheelchair like some ancient buzzard. "Bring me the tail," he said.

  "So I can throw it in the fire and watch it burn."

  Halston drove a 1973 Plymouth with a custom Cyclone Spoiler

  engine. The car was jacked and blocked, and rode with the hood

  pointing down at the road at a twenty degree angle. He had rebuilt

  the differential and the rear end himself. The shift was a Pensy, the

  linkage was Hearst. It sat on huge Bobby Unser Wide Ovals and

  had a top end of a little past one-sixty.

  He left the Drogan house at a little past 9:30. A cold rind of

  crescent moon rode overhead through the tattering November

  clouds. He rode with all the windows open, because that yellow

  stench of age and terror seemed to have settled into his clothes and

  he didn't like it. The cold was hard and sharp, eventually numbing,

  but it was good. It was blowing that yellow stench away. He got

  off the turnpike at Placer's Glen and drove through the silent town,

  which was guarded by a single yellow blinker at the intersection, at

  a thoroughly respectable thirty-five. Out of town, moving up S.R.

  35, he opened the Plymouth up a little, letting her walk. The tuned

  Spoiler engine purred like the cat had purred on his lap earlier this

  evening. Halston grinned at the simile. They moved between frost-

  white November fields full of skeleton cornstalks at a little over

  seventy.

  The cat was in a double-thickness shopping bag, tied at the top

  with heavy twine. The bag was in the passenger bucket seat. The

  cat had been sleepy and purring when Halston put it in, and it had

  purred through the entire ride. It sensed, perhaps, that Halston

  liked it and felt at home with it. Like himself, the cat was a one-

  stick.

  Strange hit, Halston thought, and was surprised to find that he was

  taking it seriously as a hit. Maybe the strangest thing about it was

  that he actually liked the cat, felt a kinship with it. If it had

  managed to get rid of those three old crocks, more power to it ...

  especially Gage, who had been taking it to Milford for a terminal

  date with a crew-cut veterinarian who would have been more than

  happy to bundle it into a ceramic-lined gas chamber the size of a

  microwave oven. He felt a kinship but no urge to renege on the hit.

  He would do it the courtesy of killing it quickly and well. He

  would park off the road beside one of those November-barren

  fields and take it out of the bag and stroke it and then snap its neck

  and sever its tail with his pocketknife. And, he thought, the body

  I'll bury honorably, saving it from the scavengers. I can't save it

  from the worms, but I can save it from the maggots.

  He was thinking these things as the car moved through the night

  like a dark blue ghost and that was when the cat walked in front of

  his eyes, up on the dashboard, tail raised arrogantly, its black-and-

  white face turned toward him, its mouth seeming to grin at him.

  "Ssssshhhh-" Halston hissed. He glanced to his right and caught a

  glimpse of the double-thickness shopping bag, a hole chewed - or

  clawed - in its side. Looked ahead again..,and the cat lifted a paw

  and batted playfully at him. The paw skidded across Halston's

  forehead. He jerked away from it and the Plymouth's big tires

  wailed on the road as it swung erratically from one side of the

  narrow blacktop to the other.

  Halston batted at the cat on the dashboard with his fist. It was

  blocking his field of vision. It spat at him, arching its back, but it

  didn't move. Halston swung again, and instead of shrinking away,

  it leaped at him.

  Gage, he thought. Just like Gage -

  He stamped the brake. The cat was on his head, blocking his vision

  with its furry belly, clawing at him, gouging at him. Halston held

  the wheel grimly. He struck the cat once, twice, a third time. And

  suddenly the road was gone, the Plymouth was running down into

  the ditch, thudding up and down on its shocks. Then, impact,

  throwing him forward against his seat belt, and the last sound he

  heard was the cat yowling inhumanly, the voice of a woman in

  pain or in the throes of sexual climax.

  He struck it with his closed fists and felt only the springy, yielding

  flex of its muscles.

  Then, second impact. And darkness.

  * * *

  The moon was down. It was an hour before dawn.

  The Plymouth lay in a ravine curdled with groundmist. Tangled in

  its grille was a snarled length of barbed wire. The hood had come

  unlatched, and tendrils of steam from the breached radiator drifted

  out of the opening to mingle with the mist.

  No feeling in his legs.

  He looked down and saw that the Plymouth's firewall had caved in

  with the impact. The back of that big Cyclone Spoiler engine block

  had smashed into his legs, pinning them.

  Outside, in the distance, the predatory squawk of an owl dropping

  onto some small, scurrying animal.

  Inside, close, the steady purr of the cat.

  It seemed to be grinning, like Alice's Cheshir
e had in Wonderland.

  As Halston watched it stood up, arched its back, and stretched. In a

  sudden limber movement like rippled silk, it leaped to his shoulder.

  Halston tried to lift his hands to push it off.

  His arms wouldn't move.

  Spinal shock, he thought. Paralyzed. Maybe temporary. More

  likely permanent.

  The cat purred in his ear like thunder.

  "Get off me," Halston said. His voice was hoarse and dry. The cat

  tensed for a moment and then settled back. Suddenly its paw batted

  Halston's cheek, and the claws were out this time. Hot lines of pain

  down to his throat.

  And the warm trickle of blood.

  Pain.

  Feeling.

  He ordered his head to move to the right, and it complied. For a

  moment his face was buried in smooth, dry fur. Halston snapped at

  the cat. It made a startled, disgruntled sound in its throat - yowk! -

  and leaped onto the seat. It stared up at him angrily, ears laid back.

  "Wasn't supposed to do that, was I?" Halston croaked. The cat

  opened its mouth and hissed at him. Looking at that strange,

  schizophrenic face, Halston could understand how Drogan might

  have thought it was a hellcat. It-

  His thoughts broke off as he became aware of a dull, tingling

  feeling in both hands and forearms.

  Feeling. Coming back. Pins and needles.

  The cat leaped at his face, claws out, spitting.

  Halston shut his eyes and opened his mouth. He bit at the cat's

  belly and got nothing but fur. The cat's front claws were clasped on

  his ears, digging in. The pain was enormous, brightly excruciating.

  Halston tried to raise his hands.

  They twitched but would not quite come out of his lap.

  He bent his head forward and began to shake it back and forth, like

  a man shaking soap out of his eyes. Hissing and squalling, the cat

  held on. Halston could feel blood trickling down his cheeks. It was

  hard to get his breath. The cat's chest was pressed over his nose. It

  was possible to get some air in by mouth, but not much. What he

  did get came through fur. His ears felt as if they had been doused

  with lighter fluid and then set on fire.

  He snapped his head back and cried out in agony - he must have

  sustained a whiplash when the Plymouth hit. But the cat hadn't

  been expecting the reverse and it flew off. Halston heard it thud

  down in the back seat.

  A trickle of blood ran in his eye. He tried again to move his hands,