The Big Meow - Diana Dueyn

“And menus, I suspect,” Hwaith said, with a sly grin.

Rhiow’s whiskers went forward. “Au, cousin, you have no idea,” she said. “The foods he’s gotten me interested that it was far better I didn’t know about…” She looked back over at Ssh’iivha. “But forgive me: you were telling us about the fire that started when the earthquake hit – “

“Well, it’s all a bit strange, isn’t it?” Ssh’iivha said. “Those poor homeless ehhif – They do get into the backlot, over some wall, or through some freight gate that’s open a few minutes longer than it should be. There’s so much of the lot, they can easily move from place to place and avoid the ss’huhio’s own security people. Not us, though. There must be a hundred People working on the Lion’s backlot, and it’s impossible for us not to be able to tell what ehhif have been where, and when, and for how long. And in the case of those poor strays, you know how they smell – “

“I do,” Rhiow said. “I have a few under my care, back home.”

Behind them, the typewriter went ding! one more time, a page was ripped out, another was rolled in. “He’s so fast,” Rhiow said.

“You have no idea,” said Ssh’iivha. “You should see him when he really gets going. He’ll be doing that hour on hour, never gets up, never looks away from the machine. I worry about him sometimes, but there’s no stopping him: besides listening to other ehhif talk, it seems to be his life.” She let out a slightly sad breath.

“And there’s not another ehhif for him?” Rhiow said.

Ssh’iivha looked pensive. “No,” she said, “not for a while now. Not the one he wants, anyway – “

“Rhi?”

She looked up. At the desk, the silent ehhif was still typing away, but Urruah was gazing down at the the page he’d just taken out of the typewriter. He glanced up at Rhiow. “You need to see this,” he said: and he sounded alarmed.

Rhiow gave Ssh’iivha a bemused look. “I’m assuming this isn’t just some attack of fannishness,” she said. “Excuse me a second– “

She leapt up quietly onto an empty spot in the bookshelf to the right of the desk, so as not to upset the ehhif, and looked over his shoulder. He was still rattling away at top speed. “Amazing how fast one of them can work with only two toes,” she said. Her own Iaehh worked the same way, but at no speed anything like this. “So what am I supposed to be seeing?”

“That last page,” Urruah said. “No, wait a second – “

He looked at the three pieces of paper to the right of the typewriter. Rhiow felt, under her skin, the small wizardry Urruah was doing. The barest breeze moved through the room, easily mistakable for a random draft; and at the same time the topmost piece of paper slid smoothly to the side so that Rhiow could see the one under it.

“Very slick,” she said, squinting at the paper. “What am I looking for, exactly?” And her tail lashed a little. “This is just so strange…” For she was much more used to Iaehh’s laptop now, and the ehhif letters that burned up clear and sharp onto the shining page, than this strange mechanical way of putting one’s thoughts into fixed form with little hammers and an inked ribbon. Yet at the same time there was that strange, retro feeling of mass and solidity about all this, the same feel one got from the cars in front of the houses and the huge stoves in the kitchen: something triumphant, a victory of intention over resistant matter. Not a wizardly mindset at all, indeed something very ehhif-ish – but you had to admire it all the same.

“Look through my eyes,” Urruah said. “It’s faster.”

She purred at his courtesy, crouched herself down compactly on the bookshelf, let her eyes go unfocused, and did the small twist and knot of wizardry that for a moment would let her share Urruah’s eyes. It always took a moment for her to synch in, for toms do not see the world the same way queens do: nearly everything has an additional edge, being judged as either enemy or potential conquest. But Urruah was both tom and wizard, and therefore knew that some things, like ehhif print, were essentially neutral in content if not context. Rhiow squinted her eyes a little, as any Person does to see more clearly, and read on the first paper:

It is a night like any other, except that this is Hollywood Boulevard, and on the Boulevard there is no such thing here as a night like any other, as they are all different while pretending to be the same.

There is a bar on Hollywood Boulevard in the Hotel of the same name, and there the citizens and denizens of the area congregate at all hours that the L.A.P.D. allows them; which in the case of the Boulevard Bar means six AM to five AM, that hour being when they mop the floor and chuck out the denizens who are unconscious or no longer able to pay their tab — this latter category being something that must be judged nightly by Tough Therese who minds the cash register, and that on a case by case basis. It is at about four-thirty AM, therefore, that someone sitting at the bar begins to hear the many and entertaining variations on the theme of helping someone else pay their tab for them. But there is also something else that sometimes happens then, and it involves the backwash from four AM, which is when sick people are known to die and crazy people are likely to become the craziest, always depending of course on what the Moon is doing.

Rhiow shook her head until her ears rattled, trying to keep her “eyes” in Urruah’s head as she did so. “What is this?” she said. “Fiction or news?”

“It’s hard to tell with them sometimes,” Urruah said, “especially when they get into magic realism. I think maybe this is an early practitioner – “

Rhiow wanted to start banging her head into some friendly yielding surface, or whack Urruah upside the head, or both. For her “magic” and “realism” were parts of the same continuum: but Urruah seemed to be describing some kind of strange ehhif literary fad rather than the simple truth. Nonetheless – it being a simpler and possibly kinder response than just getting down out of the bookcase, walking across the back of the ehhif’s chair and hitting Urruah very hard between the ears — for the moment Rhiow just kept reading:

Now it is held as a matter of fact among the residents and clients of the bar in the Hollywood Hotel that there is a place in the middle of the great North American continent where crazy people roll across to and then mostly get stuck. It is the Continental Divide, and east of it reside the people who are pretty much sane, and in Denver reside all the people who are only sort of half crazy and having hit the Divide can go no further. But the truly nutso folk roll right over the Donner Pass and down into Nevada and Oregon and Washington and so on, but most especially into California, where there is just something that attracts them, maybe the San Andreas Fault, and the crazier they are the further they go, and the very craziest wind up in Los Angeles: and the most select of those crazies are in Hollywood.

Rhiow looked over at Urruah again, more bemused than before. He simply shook his own head, and his own not-inconsiderable ears flapped as if in a gale. “Read it,” he said.

She bent her head to the page again, glancing over when it was finished to the next one —

Now even among the Hollywood set some of the crazy people stand out, and these are mostly the ones who arrive from Pennsylvania, or Transylvania, or some other vania, with an eye to relieving the locals of their hard earned dosh. There is much of this commodity available in Hollywood, for it is a locality rich in film industry types who have acquired great heaps of the necessary along the way, and who love to be seen to fling their moolauw about the landscape in various and sundry directions, thus theoretically proving that they are worth more than the cost of the clothes they stand up in, which can be considerable. Fancy jewelry much with gold and diamonds the size of California walnuts are nothing to these swells, as are mansions the size of the Grand Central Terminal, which is very grand indeed, and therefore many of the crazies, especially those who are crazy in the manner of the fox, have hit on the conceit that all the simooleans possessed by these industry swells are no good to them, for (say the crazy-as-a-fox types) they have no inner beauty, which is to say the beauty of the soul. And these foxy types get busy selling inner beauty and meditation and strange old religions and stranger new religions to these movie people, and relieving them during the process of vast wads of cash, which is of course supposedly worthless anyway, so that this is obviously what the LAPD would normally call a victimless crime.

Now a bunch of us are sitting around the bar very late in the Hollywood Hotel: and the bunch consists of Mike the Mick, who is the doorman and opens the door for those rich swells who forget how their arm muscles operate any time they approach a portal in a place where other mortals may see them: and also in attendance is Kip the Cyp, who is not from Greece but from the island where Aphrodite rose from the waves, and so is big on handling other exotic foreign bundles that have been dumped into the water by guys with speedboats and then come bobbing to the surface again before the coppers get there and notice their provenance. And also there is Shady Harry who owns the bootleg bar out back of Max Factor’s: and with him is Dora, who is a shapely blonde and Shady Harry’s companion, and a very highly paid companion at that, one who shops at Robinsons all the day and has tea there with the Hat Ladies in the Palm Room upstairs and would not be seen on the Boulevard except in a big black car with a driver, or a guy with a bankroll the size of the big black car. And while we are sitting nursing our various beverages in the dim of the night, which is most excellently silent for the most part, suddenly out of this silence rises a great howling noise like someone who has had a few slugs put into them, though not in the lung, otherwise they would sound much more like they were gargling.

“Now who may that be?” says Shady Harry, as Miss Dora turns a very light shade of pale for someone of her comely ancestry.

Mike the Mick merely nods in a knowing fashion. “It is a nutjob or head case,” he says, “who we call the Lady in Black. She is a frail who has been coming down Laurel Canyon every month or so in this weather. She has acquired this monicker as she always wears black, and very high-end black at that, so that we think she is bankrolled by some unattentive guy up Laurel. And two weeks after the moon is full, which you cannot miss because of the noise of the other crazies who inhabit these environs, she comes down the Boulevard and commences to save our souls, whether we recollect having mislaid them or not. It is interesting timing,” says Mike the Mick, “since most of our other crazies prefer the Moon to be full. You cannot stir out of doors without hitting them in such weather.”

“I think it is some kind of marketing ploy,” says Kip the Cyp, who in real life is an accountant and knows more than somewhat about ways to get and keep the cabbage, as many studios employ him in this capacity. And since Kip has an adding machine where his heart should be, this is a smart move on the studios’ part. “I think,” says Kip, “that the Lady in Black has spotted a hole in her competition’s advertising strategy and is exploiting it.” And indeed she is exploiting it out in the middle of the Boulevard for all the market will bear, which at this hour of the morning is a considerable amount.

Since it is 3 AM and there is little other entertainment to be had such an hour except the numbers game that Georgio the Wop is running behind Delmonicos, which is nothing to do with New York’s Delmonicos but does not mind being mistaken for it, such is the wicked world we live in, the bunch of us go out through the fine polished brass revolving door of the Hollywood Hotel, the first such door on the West Coast, and make our way out onto the sidewalk of the Boulevard, which is very quiet this time of night, the dice games all having retired out behind the Grauman’s Chinese. And out there in the midst of the boulevard, where few vehicles pass at such an hour, the Lady in Black comes wandering down from where Laurel Canyon crosses the Boulevard, and she is dressed far more like a babe who has just come out of one of those night clubs downtown than any normal type of god-botherer, as such folks are more usually dressed like performers in the band than like the thrush who stands up in front of the mike and sings. The Lady in Black is walking down the middle of the white line in the middle of the street like someone doing a drunk test, but as she gets closer it can be seen that there is nothing drunk about the way she is walking, and as all the while she looks neither to left nor right or at anything in particular, as far as we can see.

The Lady in Black is making the aforesaid yowling noise like some kind of upset animal, and then she stops that noise at the same time she stops in front of the Hollywood Hotel, and she turns toward us, but like someone who sees nothing: and she says very loudly, “You are all doomed.”

“This is the usual routine,” says Mike the Mick under his breath. “She has a rant about not being friends with someone.”

“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.”