Subterfuge Extract

“Just want the feline,” I whisper, rolling the last word around on my tongue.

It feels good, that word, enforcing the common cat with mystique, power, and I picture myself grabbing the tom, holding it up to my bright orange eyes…and staring. A shudder of anticipation runs through my body and I fight to control it.

“Not yet.”

I mustn’t make myself known. I refuse to kill an old man; that would make me bestial at best, a monster at worst, and both options are unappealing, though I know they wouldn’t be far off the mark. There is truth in all titles – someone told me that once, years ago. His name eludes me now, though the manner of his death doesn’t. God rest his soul, I remember his corpse, ripped to shreds, entrails everywhere, and the witch-hunt that followed was an insult to his memory. He didn’t even receive a proper burial, though I guess I was partly to blame for that. ‘Unclean’ they called him, ‘tainted by darkness’. What rot! He was as good a man as any I’d known…he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

“Twinkle twinkle little cat,” I sing softly, smiling to myself. “I wonder where your soul is at.”

I hear the man struggling off his chair, and a moment later his patio door bangs shut.

“Hey diddle rife, the cat and the knife.” I look at Orion’s Belt in the sky, blinking tears from my eyes. “The monster jumped over the moon.”

I creep out from behind the fence, eyes searching high and low for the cat. A dog in a neighbouring house lets out a yelp and I grimace – blasted things! The cat responds in kind and I smile as I spot it languidly padding near the hedges, perhaps looking for bugs. Ha! But I know better – it’s a tease, provocatively prancing around, waiting for me to approach.

So I do.