Diana Dueyn - The Big Meow

“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.

Rhiow looked at Hwaith. “I thought you said it wasn’t going to rain until October,” Urruah said.

Hwaith shrugged his tail. “Poetic license,” he said. “Anyway, it didn’t rain last night. At least, not anywhere else…”

Rhiow was beyond being all that concerned about the weather. She was bristling still, and still hearing the silent distress of Hrau’f the Silent, of one of the Powers that Be, over something long-dreaded, half-expected, now coming terribly true. In the meantime, the Silent Man had stopped typing, and was staring at the half-finished page in the typewriter. I hate it when these things don’t have an obvious ending… Rhiow heard him think.

Then Rhiow stepped down onto the Silent Man’s desk, because now – however bizarre it seemed – she understood what she needed to do. She sat down by the right side of the typewriter, and stared at him until he felt the weight of her regard and looked her in the eye.

“Cousin,” she said in the Speech, “I am on errantry, and in the Queen’s name, I greet you. Now let’s talk business.”

And the Silent Man didn’t move an inch except that his eyebrows went right up.

The Big Meow: Chapter Five

You don’t look English, the Silent Man said.

Rhiow threw a glance at Urruah. “Did I miss something?” she said.

Urruah tilted his head to one side, looking thoughtful. But before he could say anything, the Silent Man said, We’ve got a lot of Brits around here. They’re real big on the Queen.

“Ah,” Rhiow said. “I take your meaning now.” She purred, slightly amused. “You mean the queen-ehhif whose territory includes London. No, sorry, not that Queen. We have one of our own, who is of…for the moment, let’s just say a higher order.”

Those very cool eyes rested on Rhiow for a moment, and the Silent Man’s hand went off to one side, as if searching for something that wasn’t there. Then he very visibly brought the hand back to rest in front of the typewriter, and put the other hand down on top of it, as if intent on keeping the first one where it was.

“Am I meant to understand,” Rhiow said, trying not to sound too threatening about it, “that you have no problem with the idea that a cat might be able to speak?”

Oh, on the contrary, the Silent Man said, I’m thinking that this all probably has something to do with the medication. They keep telling me they’re sure they’ve got the dosage right now; but every time they say that, I get some strange new side effect. He gave Rhiow a rather cockeyed look, though again it had that cool, assessing quality to it. I’ll grant you, though, this side effect’s a lot stranger than some. And I usually don’t get them this late in my day…

“I’ve been called a lot of things in my time,” Urruah said in the Speech, “but never a side effect.”

The Silent Man looked at him. One talking cat, he said, might have been an accident. Two starts to look like a coincidence –

“And three would be enemy action?” Urruah said. I wonder, he added silently for Rhiow’s benefit, should we tell him that’s what we’re here about…?

I wouldn’t rush that, ‘Ruah. Look at him – he’s a bit on the brittle side, at the moment. And tired. Let the simplest part sink in first.

The Silent Man laughed, just a barely audible hissing sound. And a smart guy, too, he said to Urruah. Okay, you’re making the case for ‘hallucination’ a whole lot stronger now…

“I’m sorry if all this strains your sense of your grasp on reality,” Rhiow said, “but sometimes, to keep that reality in good order, such interventions become necessary.” She glanced at the page in the typewriter. “It would seem that you’ve seen something unusual: something that may have a bearing on the reason we’ve come here.”

The Silent Man leaned back in his wooden typing chair, so that it rocked back a little on its base. He looked from Rhiow to Urruah and back again, and shook his head. I seem to be seeing a lot of unusual today, he said, and rubbed his face with both hands. As he let them fall, for a moment a look of great weariness and pain showed in his eyes: but a second later it had been so completely sealed over that Rhiow wondered for a second whether she had really seen it. So let me get this straight. Cats can talk…

“Some cats can talk to humans, or ehhif as we call them,” Rhiow said. “Yes.”

“But only when our business specifically requires it,” Urruah said, “as it does now.”

Okay. But how come my cat doesn’t talk to me?

“She doesn’t know the Speech,” Urruah said. “She speaks Ailurin, like most cats do.”

The Silent Man looked unblinkingly at Urruah. There are two secret cat languages? he said. Oh, come on, now, that’s one too many. What a shame: I was starting to believe you weren’t the drugs talking…

Urruah’s tail had begun to lash; but Rhiow was amused. “One of the languages is no secret,” she said. “Humans can learn some Ailurin if they’re patient and attentive. Sheba says you know a little of it. The other language, you don’t need to learn. Everything recognizes it: and it’s not just a cat language. It’s the language in which everything was made. Not all cats know it, though – not even most of them.”

“The way most of the humans you’d meet here don’t speak Italian,” Urruah said.

The Silent Man gave Urruah a dry look. You’d be surprised how many of the humans I deal with speak Italian, he said. But let it pass. He looked back over at Rhiow again. The expression was strange. So what’s all this about?

“There are some strange things happening in your city at the moment…” Rhiow said.

The Silent Man gave her a look. Blackie, he said, this is Hollywood. If strange things didn’t happen here, I’d worry.

Hwaith snickered. The Silent Man threw him a look. And you, he said. You I’ve seen here before, but you never talked to me.

“It wasn’t allowed,” Hwaith said. “Now it is.”

“What we read about in your writing there – “ Urruah said. “That would be one of the things we’re looking into.”

Why? said the Silent Man.

Rhiow tucked herself down into what her ehhif usually referred to as “meatloaf” mode. “The explanation may take some time,” she said, “and I have to suggest that you may think it’s something to do with your medication again, as many aspects of it are going to sound bizarre.”

He smiled again. All right, he said. One thing’s for sure: my medication doesn’t refer to itself as often as you do. And the other things you’re looking into – what would those be?

Rhiow threw Urruah a look. Keep it simple! she said silently.

“The earthquakes,” Urruah said.

At this the Silent Man actually threw his head back and laughed, though again he produced no sound but a kind of hiss. Rhiow thought of the hissing way Ith laughed, and again nearly bristled, but for a different reason: humans weren’t meant to laugh so. Earthquakes! the Silent Man said, rubbing his eyes again as he recovered his composure a little. They’re just like the weather, aren’t they? Everybody talks about them, but nobody does anything about them…because nobody can. But now here you folks come along, and say you can do something. What do you do?

“It’s more in the line of prevention than direct intervention, as a rule,” Rhiow said. “Quakes are difficult to stop outright. Also, like forest fires, they have their own reasons for happening – so trying to forestall them too long can be unwise. But the ones you’ve been having lately aren’t natural. We think they may be connected to something else we’re investigating at the moment.”

I suppose, the Quiet Man said, that it might strain my present credulity too far to inquire what that might be.

“Maybe we should leave that alone for the moment,” Urruah said.

Rhiow looked thoughtfully at the Silent Man. “Let’s just say,” she said, “that some of the earthquakes that have occurred recently have a kind of connection to certain places in the city: not merely a physical one. We’re in the process of investigating some of those connections, and the spots to which they’re attached. One of them is quite near here.” She looked over at Hwaith.

“Within a couple of blocks,” Hwaith said. “Just south of Sunset, near Beverly and Crescent – “

The Silent Man nodded: though the look he gave them all was a little odd. “And there are several other locations,” Rhiow said, “that we’re going to go have a look at as well. This one was closest; our colleague Hwaith here suggested that we should stop with you first to get the news. And now I see,” and she threw a sidewise glance at Hwaith, “that the choice was wise.”

So let me see if I’ve got all this straight, the Silent Man said. What we have here is a secret organization of talking cats dedicated to stopping earthquakes…

Rhiow looked up into the Silent Man’s face, amused: for he wasn’t speaking in mockery. And it was surprising to be looked at with such quick acceptance of her intelligence by an ehhif who was not also a wizard; and not just acceptance, but humor — although the humor was not only dry, but a bit chilly. This was a creature who did not waste time denying reality. Once he had accepted it, he got on with business. But then, Rhiow thought, if I’m any judge, this Silent Man has had entirely too much reality to deal with over the past few years. That look of pain on his face was familiar: she’d seen it in Iaehh’s face too often of late. I must find out more about what’s the matter with him. If he’s going to be of help to us, the least we can do is return the favor.