Sorry if it may seem a bit slow in the beginning… but I hope you can read the whole thing! (Not Maplestory Story, there’s too many of those these days haha. Read those if you’re looking for them.) (Could I also get some feedback? ‘Cause I like writing stories and criticism or compliments help!)[Spaced paragraphs for MasterFrienz ;)]

Tramps and vagabonds have marks the make on gateposts and trees and doors, letting others of their own kind know a little about the people who live at the houses and farms they pass on their travels. I think cats must leave similar signs; how else to explain the cats who turn up at out door through the year, hungry and flea-ridden and abandoned?

We take them in. We get rid of the fleas and the tucks, feed them, and take them to the vet. We pay for them to get their shots, and, indignity upon indignity, we have then neutered or spayed.
And they stay with us: for a few months, or for a year, or for forever.

Most of them arrive in summer. We live in the country just the right distance out of town for the city dwellers to abandon their cats near us.

We never see, to have more than eight cats, rarely have less than three. The cat population of my house if currently as follows: Hermione and Pod, tabby and black respectively, the mad sisters who live in my attic office and do not mingle; Snowflake, the blue-eyes long-haired white cat, who lived wild in the woods for years before she gave up her wild ways for soft sofas and beds; and, last but largest, Furball, Snowflake’s cushion-like calico long haired daughter, orange and black and white, whom I discovered as a tine kitten in our garage one day, strangled and almost dead, her head poked through an old badminton net, and who surprised us all by not dying but instead growing to up to be the best natured cat I have ever encountered.

And then there is the black cat. Who has no other name than the Black Cat and who turned up almost a month ago. We did not realize he was going to be living here at first: he looked to well-fed to be a stray, too old and jaunty to have been abandoned. He looked like a small panther, and he moved like a patch of night.
One day, in the summer, he was lurking about our ramshackle porch: eight or nine years old, at a guess, male, greenish-yellow of eye, every friendly, quite unperturbable. I assumed he belonged to a neighboring farmer or household. I went away for a few weeks, to finish writing a book, and when I came home he was still on our porch, living in an old cat bed one of the children had found for him. He was, however, almost unrecognizable. Patches of fur had gone, and there were deep scratches on his gray skin. The tip of one ear was chewed away. There was a gash beneath one eye, a slice gone from one lip. He looked tired and thin.

We took Black Cat to the bet, where we got him some antibiotics, which we fed him each night, along with soft cat food.

We wondered who he was fighting. Snowflake, our beautiful white near-feral queen? Raccoons? A rattailed, fanged possum?

Each night the scratches would be worse-one night his side would be chewed up; the next it would be his underbelly, raked with claw marks and bloody to the touch.

When it go to that point, I took him down to the basement to recover besides the furnace and the piles of boxes. He was surprisingly heavy, the black cat, and I picked him up and carried him down there, with a cat basket, and a litter box and some food and water. I closed the door behind me. I had to wash the blood from my hands when I left the basement. He stayed down there for four days. At first he seemed too weak to feed himself: a cut beneath one eye had rendered him almost one-eyed, and he limped and lolled weakly, think yellow pus oozing from the cut in his lip.

I went down there every morning and every night, and I fed him and gave him antibiotics, which I mixed with his canned food, and I dabbed at the worst of the cuts, and spoke to him. He had diarrhea, and, although I changed his litter daily, the basement stank evilly.

The four days that Black Cat lived in the basement were a bad four days in my house: the baby slipped in the bath and banged her head and might have drowned; I learned that a project that I had set my heart on-adapting Hole Mirrlee’s novel Lud in the Mist for the BBC-was no longer going to happen, and I realized that I did not have the energy to begin again from scratch, pitching it to other networks or to other media; my daughter left for summer camp and immediately began to send home a plethora of heart-tearing letters and cards, 5 or 6 each day, imploring us to bring her home; my son had some kind of fight with his best friend, to the point that they were no longer on speaking terms; and, returning home one night, my wife hit a deer that ran out in from of the car. The deer was killed, the car was left undriveable, and my wife sustained a small cut ever one eye.

By the fourth day, the cat was prowling the basement, walking haltingly but impatiently between the stacks of books and comics, the boxes of mail and cassettes, of pictures and of gifts and of stuff. He mewed at me to let him out and, reluctantly, I did so.

He went back onto the porch and slept there for the rest of the day.

The next morning there were deep new gashes in his flanks, and clumps of black cat hair-his-covered the wooden boards of the porch.

Letters arrived that day from my daughter, telling us that camp was going better and she thought she could survive a few days; my son and his friend sorted out their problem, although what the argument was about-trading cards, computer games, Star Wars, A Girl-I would never learn. The BBC executives who had vetoed the Lud in the Mist was discovered to have been taking bribes (well, “questionable loans”) from an independent production company and was sent home on permanent leave: his successor, I was delighted to learn when she faxed me, was the woman who had initially proposed the project to me before leaving the BBC. I thought about returning Black cat to the basement, but decided against it. Instead, I resolved to try and discover what kind of animal was comng to our house each nigh and from there to formulate a plan of action-to trap it, perhaps.
For birthdays and Christmas, my family gives my gadgets and gizmos, pricy toys which excite my fancy but, ultimately, rarely leaving their boxes. There is a food dehydrater and an electric carving knife, a breadmaking machine, and last y ear’s present, a pair of see-in-the-dark binoculars. On Christmas day I had put the batteries into the binoculars and had walked about the basement in the dark, too impatient even to wait until nightfall, stalking a flock of imaginary Starlings. (You were warned not to turn it on in the light: that would have damaged the binoculars and quite possibly your eyes as well.) Afterward I had put the device back into its box, and it sat there still, in my office, besides the box of computer cables and forgotten bits and pieces.

Perhaps, I thought, if the creature, dog cat or raccoon or what have you, were to see me sitting on the porch, it would not come, so I took a chair into the box and coatroom, little larger than a closet, which overlooks the porch, and, when everyone in the house was asleep, I went out onto the porch and bad the Black Cat goodnight.
That cat, my wife had said, when he first arrived, is a person. And there was something very person like in his huge leonine face: his broad black nose, his greenish-yellow eyes, his fanged but amiable mouth (still leaking amber pus from the right lower lip).

I stroked his head, and scratched him beneath the chin and wished him well. Then I went inside and turned off the light on the porch.

I sat on my chair in the darkness inside the house with the see in the dark binoculars on my lap. I had switched the binoculars on, and a truckle of greenish light came from the eyepieces.

Time passed, in the darkness.

I experimented with looking at the darkness with the binoculars, learning to focus, to see the world in shades of green. I found myself horrified but the number of swarming insects I could see in the night air: it was as if the night world were some kind of nightmarish soup, swimming with life. Then I lowered the binoculars from my eyes and stared out at the rich blacks and blues of the night, empty, and peaceful, and calm.

Time passes. I struggled to keep awake, found myself profoundly missing cigarettes and coffee, my two lost addictions. Either of them would have kept my eyes open. But before I had tumbled too far into the world of sleep and dreams, a yowl from the garden jerked me fully awake. I fumbled the binoculars to my eyes and was disappointed to see that it was merely Snowflake, the white cat, streaking across the from the garden like a patch of greenish white light. She vanished into the woodland to the left of the house and was gone.

I was about to settle myself back down when it occurred to me to wonder what exactly had startled Snowflake so, and I began scanning the middle distance with the binoculars, looking for a huge raccoon, a dog, or a vicious possum. And there was indeed something coming down the driveway toward the house. I could see it through the binoculars, clear as day.

It was the Devil.

I had never seen the Devil before, and, although I had written about him in the past, if pressed would have confessed that I had no belief in him, other than as an imaginary figure tragic and Miltonion. The figure coming up the driveway was not Milton’s Lucifer. It was the Devil.

My heart began to pound in my chest, to pound so hard that it hurt. I hoped it could not see me, that, in a dark house, behind the window glass, I was hidden.

The figure flickered and changed as it walked up the drive. One moment it was dark, bull like, minotuarish, the next it was slim and female and the next it was a cat itself, a scarred, huge gray-green wildcat, its face contorted with hate.

There are steps that lead up to my porch, four white wooden steps in need of a coat of paint (I knew they were white, although they were, like everything else, green through my binoculars). At the bottom of the steps, the Devil stopped and called out something that I could not understand, three, perhaps four words in a whining, howling language when Babylon was young: and, although I did not understand the words, I felt the hairs raise on the back of my head as it called.

And then I head, muffled through the glass but still audible, a low growl, a challenge, and-slowly, unsteadily-a black figure walked down the steps of the house, away from me, toward the Devil. These days Black Cat no longer moved like a panther, instead he stumbled and rocked, like a sailor only recently returned to land.
The Devil was a woman, now. She sad something soothing and gentle to the cat, in a tongue that sounded like French, and reached out a hand to him. He sank his teeth into her arm, and her lip curled, and spat at him.
The woman glanced up at me then, and if I had doubted that she was the Devil before, I was certain of it now: the woman’s eye flashed red fire at me, but you can see no red thorugh the night vision binoculars, only shades of a green. And the Devil saw through the window. It saw me. I am in no doubt about that at all.

The Devil twisted and writhe, and now it was some kind of a jackal, flatfaced, hugeheaded, bullnecked, creature, halfway between a hyena and a dingo. There were maggots squirming in its mangy fur, and it began to walk up the steps. Black Cat leapt upon it, and in seconds they became a rolling writhing thing, moving faster than my eyes could follow.

All this in silence.

And then a low roar-down the country road at the bottom of our drive, in the distance, lumbered a late-night truck, its blazing headlights burning bright as green suns through the binoculars. I lowered them from my eyes and saw only darkness, and the gentle yellow of headlights, and then the red of rear lights as it vanished off again into nowhere at all.

When I raise the binoculars once more, there was nothing to be seen. Only Black Cat on the steps, staring up into the air. I trained the binoculars up and saw something flying away-a vulture, perhaps, or an eagle-and then it flew beyond the trees and was gone.

I went out into the porch and picked up Black Cat, and stroked him, and said kind, soothing things to him. He mewled piteously when I first approached him, but, after a while, he went to sleep on my lap, and I put him into his basket, and went upstairs to my bed, to sleep myself. There was dried blood on my t-shirt and jeans, the following morning.

That was a week ago.

The thing that comes to my house does not come every night. But it comes most night: we know it by the wounds on the cat, and the pain I can see in those leonine eyes. He has lost the used of his from left paw, and his right eye has closed for good.

I wonder what we did to deserve Black Cat. I wonder who sent him. And, selfish and scared, I wonder how much more he has to give.