LAST WEEK: Jeremy adopts a small, deaf, black cat and names it Beethoven. Or maybe it adopts him. Beethoven is the only being not affected by Jeremy’s music.
Read last week’s installment here. See all installments here. Read the next installment here.
Chapter 121
River
San Francisco — 1986
King of the Cats
River watches the cats gather. It’s the kind of night where people take to their beds. Children cower beneath covers, animals burrow beneath the earth, dogs howl at hidden moons, and birds huddle in their nests. But cats, cats open their eyes. Cats, like cities, like vampires, come alive at night.
River thinks of a folktale from his childhood. A man, traveling at night toward his brother’s house, sees four cats carrying a small coffin, topped by a golden crown. As he passes the cemetery, a cat sticks its head through the railings and says, “Tell Balgeary that Balgury is dead.”
When the man reaches his brother’s house he says. “I know you’ll not believe me. But I swear to you, and I am sober as a babe, tonight I saw four cats carrying a coffin, on top was a small golden crown. Then, as I was a-walking by the graveyard, a cat says to me, ‘Tell Balgeary that Balgury is dead.’”
No sooner have the words left his lips, then his brother’s cat cries, “Then I am the king of the cats!” and rushes up the chimney, never to be seen again.
“Tell Balgeary that Balgury is dead,” says River aloud, feeling only slightly foolish.
He waits to see what, if anything, will happen. For all he knows, fairy tales may be true. After all, he has seen Thanatos, whom he thought to be a harmless old man, draining blood from living bodies. Not, thinks River, that it would have been more reassuring to see him draining the dead. He has seen Mike and… River can’t even think about Pamela. He doesn’t, he cannot believe, that Thanatos is really a Greek God, a Greek God living in San Francisco delivering blood to the undead, and yet, and yet…
Life may or may not be stranger than fiction, but it’s almost always crueler. River craves a happy ending. He wants a tale not written in blood and tears.
River doesn’t know that the cats, too, are telling stories in the night. They are telling tales of a cat, blacker than midnight, silent as hope, whose very being spoke of love and longing, of heat and desire, of wildness. He could make even the sleekest Siamese or the most pampered Persian claw their way to freedom with a single glance, only to eviscerate them with a bite, or tear them limb from limb.
Freedom is so much more dangerous than domesticity, wildness more ephemeral than captivity. But the midnight cat made it seem almost worth losing one’s life to have a brief moment of exhilaration, the terror of finality when one embraces darkness and becomes part of the night. That was the power behind his summons: the promise of being fully alive, for at least a fleeting moment, before obscurity.
The tales are all told now. The cats drift away like dreams in daylight. River stands looking into the empty windows of the night house.
Chapter 122
River
San Francisco — 1986
New Year’s Ending
The fireworks are mostly finished. The sky is gray with smoke. In the distance, occasional flashes still briefly light the haze, sporadic crashes explode and fade like an erratic tide. River stares at the abandoned house.
Huck swoops onto his shoulder, feathers brushing his ears like whispers.
“Huck,” River says, “Don’t ever go away. Don’t ever leave me. Don’t ever die.” Huck nibbles River’s ear and makes gentle cooing noises.
As they wander homeward, River wonders if his world has always been so strange. He wonders if Gods can live on Earth. He has always believed that he could control his fate, but now it seems that despite his best intentions, there will never be a happily ever after. The prince is mortal, doomed to die; the princess is a monster, and the kingdom is slowly collapsing into entropy.
Chapter 123
Jeremy
San Rafael — 1876
Magic!
Ryo watches as the past rolls on. It’s twilight. Jeremy has finished his eight hours of practice and is out walking through golden fields. Smoke weaves the smell of burning wood and sugar through the air.
At the end of the field is a tall man. His shadow stretches over the earth, longer than the eucalyptus. His arms are muscular, hard and strong as iron. He would have looked like a bronze god, but for his feet, which are curved inward like a crab’s. Behind him looms an enormous wheelchair of dark metal. The man juggles fire, throwing sparks of red and gold into the sky like rising stars. The man beckons to Jeremy. When Jeremy comes close, he reaches out and touches Jeremy’s cheek. Jeremy feels a current, hot and white, ignite his heart. The juggler raises his hands skyward and electricity springs from his fingertips.
From Jeremy’s pocket rise the shavings of silver from his father’s desk. They trickle out, following the upward sweep of the juggler’s hands like scattered dreams. They dance in the light. Catching the late afternoon sun, the juggler rolls the partials between his fingers.
“Voilà!” he says pulling a silver bullet from Jeremy’s left ear with a flourish. “Yours, my lad.”
“How did you…?”
“Magic! Magic to protect you from harm.”
From over the Bay, a great fog rolls in, blanketing the golden hills, the man, the wheelchair, and the fire. When the mist clears, all that remains is a thin curl of smoke rising like music in the mist.
Jeremy stumbles home. Magic! He wants to learn magic, to juggle flames, roll partials into weapons and disappear like mist. He wires the silver bullet to his watch chain and is never without it. He begins to teach himself to manipulate coins, telling his mother that they are exercises for improving manual dexterity.
He spends hours each night trying to pull Beethoven out of a top hat. Beethoven is placid, only protesting once, when Jeremy tries to attach faux rabbit ears to his head.
Chapter 124
River
San Francisco — 1986
The Monster Within
The city remains in lockdown. Children insist on nightlights under their beds. People suffer insomnia. Of course, most do not really believe in vampires and ghosts. They fear a psychopath.
As well they should, River thinks. Life is much crueler than fantasy. What supernatural beast has ever killed as many, as horribly, as a plague? What monster ever murdered as coldly and efficiently as the Nazis? What phantom ever set out to annihilate an entire people? He, like Amimi, knows that the one to fear is the monster within.
Nonetheless, River has seen things he can’t deny or comprehend. He cannot consider the possibilities and he cannot stop thinking about the probabilities. Everywhere he goes, grief walks beside him. When he tries to sleep, sorrow sits on the foot of his bed and pushes a weighty hand against his chest.
Perhaps if Amimi could travel, she would have offered some comfort. No one understands loneliness better than ghosts and forgotten gods. But Amimi can wander only in memory and time. She is the spirit of a place. She is the specter of a season. She cannot spread her wings like rainbow crow and fly to the sun.
Chapter 125
Jeremy
San Francisco — 1877
Requiem for an Insect
At eighteen, Jeremy leaves home, sailing over the Bay, Beethoven in his knapsack. He takes his violin with him. He pays for passage with a few coins he has smuggled from home. Once on board he lets the wind and water wash away the past. Beethoven doesn’t make a sound.
Landing at the wharf, the city welcomes him with mist and mystery. But money does not come easily. He tries playing in the train station. The train derails. The tunnel is evacuated. He does magic tricks near the Ghirardelli Chocolate factory, garnering a few coins. But when a policeman, hard black shoes tap, tap, tapping along the cobble stones, asks for Jeremy’s papers and place of abode, he and Beethoven are forced to leave. They spend the night in a misty doorway.
By day, he roams the dock, pulling coins from children’s ears and noses. At night, Beethoven eats the rats that Jeremy stuns with Paganini’s Caprice No. 24.
When Jeremy perfects the cat in the hat trick, he achieves a certain fame. Children tell their parents. Parents tell their peers. Before long, Jeremy and Beethoven are booked at a few nightclubs as an opening act. Jeremy’s finally making enough money to rent a room in a boarding house in the Tenderloin.
Beethoven and Jeremy expand their act. On the street outside his room, Jeremy plays his violin. When insects drop from the sky, unconscious, he wraps them in tissue, taking care not to damage wings or body. Then he freezes them. For most, this would have been difficult, refrigerators not having been invented yet. But for Jeremy, it’s easy. Just a few notes of Mozart’s Requiem and icicles drop from his bow like sorrow.
Jeremy gently binds insect to ice. This causes a short-term coma. Jeremy spent hours timing how long the bug would take to revive. Once he has it down, Bug Lazarus becomes part of his street routine. Jeremy carries a small ice chest with him to keep the quick and the undead still. Taking a large showy insect, like a mantis or a butterfly, he waves his hands over the prone insect. Waving helps to quicken the defrost process. Then he chants some mystic gibberish and the bug springs to life and flies into the crowd, to delighted shrieks and gasps of amazement.
Jeremy teaches Beethoven to play dead, lying, unmoving, a small, black furry shadow in Jeremy’s arms. Jeremy lays him gently on the table. Waving his left hand over Beethoven, he whispers the magic spell. The cat springs up, lively and hissing. It’s the air that Jeremy waves over Beethoven that cues his awakening. Beethoven cannot hear words, magic or otherwise.
Chapter 126
River
San Francisco — 1986
The Fabric of the Universe
River stares at the thin white cloth covering his rising bread. Huck grabs a corner, trying to reveal his unleavened child.
“Huck!” River cries, pushing him away. It seems a long, long time since his baking has been fruitful. He does not know how to patch the emptiness in his heart, how to live with the fear that loss is the only reality and that love always ends in death and loneliness. He pets Huck’s rainbow black feathers, and gazes out the window, not noticing that Huck is pecking at the un-risen dough, making his beak sticky and white.
Watch the author read this week’s installment in the video below:
NEXT WEEK: Gabriel is exhausted by dreams where it is always sunset. In dreams, the world is no longer divided, no longer separate, no longer apart, yet still he lacks the color that will make him whole—the color of empathy.
Edited by Mitchelle Lumumba and Sophie Gorjance.
E.E. King is cohost of the MetaStellar YouTube channel's Long Lost Friends segment. She is also a painter, performer, writer, and naturalist. She’ll do anything that won’t pay the bills, especially if it involves animals. Ray Bradbury called her stories “marvelously inventive, wildly funny and deeply thought-provoking. I cannot recommend them highly enough.” She’s been published widely, including Clarkesworld and Flametree. She also co-hosts The Long Lost Friends Show on MetaStellar's YouTube channel. Check out paintings, writing, musings, and books at ElizabethEveKing.com and visit her author page on Amazon.