The Big Meow

They walked back through the garden maze to the house. “The young tom-ehhif who lived here with his queen,” Hwaith said, “had a personal assistant who worked closely with him. Something went wrong with this other young tom-ehhif – no one’s sure what. One story was that he was jealous of the relationship between the tom and queen – though which of them he might have desired, no one’s sure. Another was that he’d become ill in his mind, and couldn’t tell friend from enemy any longer.”

They came to a halt in front of a set of floor-to-ceiling glass doors set in behind a little terrace. “Right there,” Hwaith said, “something more than twenty years ago now, the tom-ehhif who lived here was shot by his assistant: and soon after, when someone came to the house, the assistant shot himself as well. At first there were few questions about it. Afterwards the questions just wouldn’t stop. Why didn’t the queen-ehhif hear the first shot? Did she perhaps fire it herself? What was the assistant doing there that night, when he’d been told not to come? And there were a hundred other issues about it that couldn’t be settled to anyone’s satisfaction…” Hwaith waved his tail. “Finally the young tom’s father sold the house to someone else: another pair of wealthy ehhif. They own it still. But they’re not here much. I think the place troubles them.”

He let out a breath: they both sat for a few seconds in the quiet. Off in the trees down the hill, a California jay produced its rusty call from a throat that sounded like it really needed to be greased. “You must be thinking that ehhif here don’t do anything but kill each other,” Hwaith said.

“Oh, no,” Rhiow said. She looked down the length of the house. “But you say the ehhif who den here won’t stay… You think they feel the place is th’haimenh?” It was the Speech-cognate of the Ailurin word sseih’huuh, “haunted,” though the word in the Speech was more precise about the cause of the associated apparitions – more a kind of lingering, self-repeating spectral recording than any real local persistence of soul, for which there was another set of words.

“I don’t know,” Hwaith said. “I’m not clear about how ehhif think of such things. You live with them full time: maybe you know better than I would.”

Rhiow thought briefly about Iaehh, sitting some nights in the silence of the apartment that was only his now, his eyes still and sad, his head held in a way that suggested he was listening in mind to a voice he would never hear in life again.

“I’m not always sure, either,” she said, and got up. “Hwaith, let’s get back to the Silent Man’s. They’ll be thinking about getting ready to go. …And maybe,” she said, glancing over her shoulder and flirting her tail, “you’ll show me just how you diffuse that air.”

In utter silence, Hwaith vanished. Rhiow followed.

When the Silent Man’s car rolled up the broad, curving cypress-lined drive to the front door of Elwin Dagenham’s house in the hills, the pre-intervention conference in the back seat was still in full swing.

“My back fur looks terrible.”

“Sheba, it’s just fine.”

“No it’s not, it won’t lie down.”

“I could help you with that.”

Whack! “Ow!”

“I told you, I’m not interested! Come back in three months.”

“Will there be food? I’m starving.”

“I told you to eat before you left.”

“Did not.”

“Did too.”

“There’s always plenty of food. Just make sure you get it before the houiff do.”

“Houiff? Nobody said anything about houiff!”

“I must have mentioned them at least once or twice. Oh, it won’t stay down!”

“All you need is for someone to lick it a little – “

Whack! “Oww!!”

“I told you, three months!”

“There must be something in the food here. Hwaith, do they put hormones in the cat food here? Normally he’d have heard her the first ten times she told him.”

“Could just be excitement. Or memory loss. I hear you can start to incur memory loss if you have really big – “

“And don’t worry, they’re usually only little houiff. Oh, you do get the occasional houff at one of these who’s a film star. That nice big German shepherd, now, he’s a creampuff. Oh, and there’s a collie now too. Actually, there are about nine of them. All idiots, just hit them in the head if they so much as look at you and they’ll run off crying.”

“Memory loss? Who says that?”

The car rolled slowly across gravel, stopped with a crunch of tires: the driver turned around, looked into the shadowy back seat. Awful quiet back there, he said to Helen. Are they all right? Anybody get carsick?

“They’re fine,” Helen said. “Cousins, somebody use the Speech and put our host’s mind at rest.”