The Big Meow

“You are not the friends of the Great Old One,” she says, “and so when he comes, he will not be kind to you as he will be to his friends, who will be granted the gift of swift oblivion, but you will suddenly take leave of your bodies and your unhoused souls will writhe in torment through aeons uncounted and you will wish that you had been friends of the Devourer of Worlds, but it will be too late for you.”

“And now she will tell us the price of admission to being this Devourer guy’s friends,” says Mike the Mick in my ear, “and it will be retail, not wholesale.”

“For now at last comes the hour of the day, and the day of the year, and the year of the aeon of the Black Leopard,” says or rather shouts the Lady in Black, “and of that aeon there will be no ending, and the sheaf of sheaves of worlds will be torn open by His teeth and gulped down in His maw, and all lesser dominations even unto the God of the gods will be cast out into the houseless void, and cease to be.”

One more page came out of the typewriter and went down onto the desk, and another page was rolled in, and the machine-gun-fast typing started again. As it came down and the last words vanished under the new page, Rhiow heard something she had never heard before, and hoped never to hear again: the Whisperer yowling low in Her throat, in great and increasing distress.

The fur bristling all over her, Rhiow craned her neck to look down at the new page. Hwaith leapt up onto the bookshelf beside her. Did you hear that? Rhiow said silently, to both him and Urruah.

Hwaith’s eyes were as wide as Urruah’s were. Yes, Hwaith said: and, I wish I hadn’t, said Urruah.

“This is unusual,” says Mike the Mick. “She has not yet offered to save our souls. That is usually the blowoff that follows such a pitch.”

“For the sacrifice has been made in full, though mindlessly,” says the doll in black, as a big Ford goes by her and she pays it not a red cent’s worth of mind. “And mindfully it is made now, three times three; and the Black Leopard receives it, and the end time is set in train. Exult then, fanged ones, exult in the hour of night when the prophecy is at last made real, and the worthless worlds are made an end of, and the Black One gorges Himself full on the corpse that is all Life.”

And she walks on by us, right down that white line, and pauses at the intersection of Hollywood and Highland and then hangs a left and vanishes around the corner of the hotel. And we stand there being quiet, since though we are all always being told that we are doomed, it rarely gets done quite like this.

“Now there is a lady who is minus at least one banana from the bunch,” says Kip the Cyp.

“The City ought to do something,” says Miss Dora. “What are we paying our taxes for?”

And they all go back inside through the beautiful brass rotating door of the Hollywood Hotel, with Mike the Mick and myself being the last ones to go. “It is strange that she did not try to charge us the usual rate,” says Mike the Mick, “which always involves some kind of meeting up in the rich part of the hills and a great forking over of cash.”

“Now where is she gone to?” I say.

“Let us go see,” says Mike the Mick. “But I do not think we will see much.”

We go up to the corner of Hollywood and Highland, and as we go it commences to rain, which is a peculiar thing out of what seems like a clear sky, but then with the lights as bright as they are on Hollywood Boulevard these days, it is often hard to tell what is going on up in the aether. And when we look up Highland, there is no sign of her.

“For a doll dressed like that she moves fast,” I say to Mike the Mick.

“This I have seen before,” says Mike. “But there is never anyone there to pick her up in a car, and I sometimes think she must slip into one of the apartment buildings up Highland, but there is no sign of her doing so, and no one up there seems to know about her, for once or twice when I have a slow lunch hour I go up there to ask a few questions, and no one shows any sign of having been bought off, which I would surely detect by now.”

So we head back in the direction of the Hollywood Hotel, and Mike the Mick says, “I have seen the Lady in Black three months running now, and I do not know whether I should buy some more umbrellas when I see her, or throw them away.” Because as we walk back up the Boulevard, the street where it was raining is now as dry as any number of bones.

Now we have plenty of ghosts here but none of them can dry the street up after a rain, and I wonder whether the City should try to procure her services in the flood season. Yet if the Lady in Black is in fact producing the rain, then a joe with a smart head could use her to make a lot of moolah out of the LA County Flood Control Board. But no one can catch her long enough to figure out which side she should be working for, or against, which is annoying and also too much like life.

The Silent Man stopped typing, and stared at the paper.