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To Elizabeth Stamford's previous pieceGugusi
Night after night, the Reverend fell into a bleak, sleepless trance, and opened his eyes to a dawn that was even bleaker. One morning however, he did not see winter’s frost on the pane, nor did he see his stiff-backed chair leaned up against the wall; instead he saw palm fronds quivering overhead. He knew somehow that he had awakened in the jungle, in a place where water collected in rills and runnels, dripping from leaves as big as frying pans. The Reverend sat up in the mud looking around in wonder, and then he saw brown-skinned people moving among the trees. Instinctively, he made his way toward them. They sat in a ring beating the red ground with their sticks, fixing their eyes on a fire burning in middle of the circle. No one appeared to notice the Reverend except for a big woman who sang in a voice as rich as plum cake. The Reverend felt that she was addressing him, and the sound of her voice was so compelling that he could not help but drawer closer still.
Abruptly, the woman stopped singing and he recognized her as his housekeeper, Mariah. Her face was shiny and she wore beads and dried grasses around her generous waist. The Reverend couldn’t help but stare in astonishment. What was she doing here in this jungle-dream? She smiled, showing her gleaming teeth.
Long ago, the Reverend had lived in a lush African place with his wife and daughter. They had been missionaries then, among the River People of the Ugongo. Mariah, then a knock-kneed girl of twelve, had appeared at the Reverend’s back door one stormy Sunday after Vespers. Her clan had abandoned her at the edge of the Evil Forest, but she wasn’t ready to die. The Reverend surmised that all this was because of the creature that followed close behind her. At first glance, it resembled an ordinary black cat, but it had eight legs, and it used them all as it walked, rather like a spider.
“He follows me everywhere,” Mariah whispered, her lip wobbling. “They say he will bring bad luck.”
The Reverend took Mariah in of course; after all, he had a reputation to uphold. For years he had been trying to rid the Ugongo of their primitive beliefs and this seemed to be a unique opportunity. Once he proved that Mariah and the cat were not cursed, but children of God, the Ugongo might at last begin to put their faith in the church.
Little Mariah quickly learned to cook and sew and she became a welcome playmate for the Reverend’s daughter Grace. The eight-legged cat, however, was a nuisance. Much to the Reverend’s chagrin, Gracie invited it into the house, offering it sips of warm cream, and try as he might, the Reverend could not rid himself of the grotesque image of it curled up on his daughter’s lap.
As time went by, the creature’s presence caused the Reverend increasing discomfort. The Panthopus (named for an octopus and panther) moved slowly through the house, drifting down the stairs into the basement, floating up the stairs into the attic – there was no telling where it might be from one minute to the next. Thinking that a dog would scare the creature away, the Reverend imported a large Rhodesian Ridgeback notorious for its hatred of cats. For the first day after the dog’s arrival the Panthopus disappeared, but early the next morning it returned, licking sweetly at the cream, coughing on the butter, and then tripping haughtily into the living room where it curled up among the cushions on the divan. Thelma, the Reverend’s wife, did not find the creature unpleasant, and nor apparently did the dog. Irritatingly, Mariah and Gracie had by now developed a clear fondness for the cat, and eventually Thelma too was seduced.
“Isn’t it sweet?” she murmured, touching Panthopus’s velvet ear. “It’s so wise-looking…”
At this, the Reverend felt he could no longer bear having such an un-Godly creature in his house, and, on a balmy equatorial night, he lit a lantern and crept out to dig up some gugusi deadliness. The root of the gugusi tree was the color of rotting peach flesh and had the consistency of taffy. It killed as quickly and quietly as a snowfall, which was how the cat died – without fuss. The creature’s body was found the next day under a miniature banana tree. Its eyes were closed and it wore a serene expression.
“A little saint!” Gracie sobbed. She, as well as her mother and Mariah were inconsolable. The three wore black lace and wept for days.
But the beast’s death did not bring the Reverend the relief he had expected. In fact, he felt its presence more keenly than ever, and, in the weeks that followed, he found himself enveloped, more and more oppressively by a soft, smothering sensation that marred his enjoyment of even the tiniest things: the taste of Thelma’s Paw -Paw Surprise, the Dark Continent Chronicle that came on the third Tuesday of every other month, and missives from the Bishop himself praising him for his excellent work.
Unbeknownst to the Reverend, Thelma had sent the cat’s remains to a Capetown taxidermist – reputedly the finest on the African subcontinent. Six months to the day after the creature's death, a lumpy package arrived at the church by special delivery, and Gracie and Mariah ripped it open, squealing with joy. The stuffed cat was almost as intolerable as it had been alive, and the Reverend turned away from it feeling a prickle of nausea at the back of his throat.
The following year it was time to return to the coastal parish of Blackwell, Massachusetts. The Reverend and his wife brought Mariah back with them, and as the years dragged by, Gracie married and had two children, Thelma died of boredom, and Mariah grew big and fat. Even after Thelma’s death and Gracie’s marriage, the creature remained on the Reverend’s desk. But as much as he despised the thing, the Reverend could not bring himself to throw it away. Once, he had tried to give it to a stranger who came seeking shelter from a storm, but the man wouldn’t take it. “It’s a precious thing,” he said. “You shouldn’t give it away.”
After that, the Reverend had yelled at the stranger making him leave in the height of the wind and the rain. The darkness in him grew and his moods became as unpredictable as those of a kicking horse. The Reverend prayed, begging for an epiphany that would return to him the kernels of goodness buried deep in the graveyard of his soul. Meanwhile, he abused small dogs in the street, hoarded money, and snarled at his grandchildren. He had begun to give up all hope, and it was in the dawn of this despair that he began to hear the noises.
Exactly when the Reverend first heard the sound he could not say, but he thought it must have been sometime in August when the sunsets came pink and tattered, and the furniture swelled like raisins put to soak. At first the Reverend assumed that the yowls came from the neighbor’s cat, only to discover that the neighbor had no cat, just a flatulent poodle named Jonathan. The Reverend then concluded that the mewling must have belonged to a stray, but a thorough inspection of the premises both at night and during the day yielded no cat either. And when, disturbed, he paused in his sermon writing or hurriedly crossed the room to close the screens, or ran to find Mariah, Grace or one of the children to ask if they too had heard the sound, they all spoke convincingly of its nonexistence. There were, of course, dozens of explanations: bats (in whose belfry?) were one, the wind howling in the chimney, the floorboards squeaking, a seagull crying out on Blackwell Rock. And the more the Reverend insisted that the sound was none of these things, the more his family tried to pacify him, telling him that he was certainly not hearing what he thought he was. As the hours, days, weeks and months passed, the mewing continued at odd intervals. Sometimes the Reverend might go for a few days without hearing a thing and then it would start up again in the middle of the night, or at the tail end of Sunday lunch. Sometimes loud, sometimes soft, sometimes muffled, sometimes clear and shrill. There seemed to be no escaping it, and soon it became clear that the Reverend’ s daughter Grace and even Mariah, the housekeeper had started to think he was a little soft in the head. Grace even went so far as to scold her father, telling him that he needed to take a holiday, that he wasn’t himself, that he was coming down with some creeping illness.
The Reverend was beginning to find it difficult to breathe at night, and he couldn’t sleep. Soon, he was so exhausted that the days seemed to pass in a galloping haze and the seasons drifted into one another so smoothly that it was difficult to tell where summer had turned to fall, and where fall had turned to winter. A viscous fog had settled around the house, and there were mornings when the sun rose over Blackwell Rock as if floating upward through water, and there were nights when the sun seemed to smolder behind the moon – all yellow and empty. Above the scraggly flower beds and the low hedges bordering the property; a little shadow sometimes appeared, moving from one part of the lawn to another, in the brightness of the sun or in the dark of the waning moon, the shadow never seemed to go away, no matter what the season.
Sometimes at night when the Reverend lay in bed, he fancied he saw it move – the stuffed beast on his desk – and once, half-suffocated, he was jolted from an uneasy doze to find the creature crouched on his chest, its eyes glowing ghost-pale and peach like, recalling to him the unmistakable hue of gugusi. Terrified, the Reverend tried to cry out, but only a small strange sound flew from his throat: a sound not unlike the mewing of a cat. He tried again, this time screaming for Mariah, but where was she? Where was Mariah?
Mariah was in the jungle of course, seated before the Reverend in her grasses and her beads. The sound of the burbling, running jungle-rain recalled to him the events surrounding the Panthopus, from its arrival to its awful demise. And in the warmth of the womb, the green of the palm stalks, he sat at Mariah’s feet in the sacred mud.
“It’s alive,” she said, moving aside, and he noticed an eight-legged cat curled up behind her, its coat sleek and shiny. The creature blinked its golden eyes and moved its head. Its face was intriguing: dark and delicate in the dancing firelight. The Reverend’s eyes burned and he felt them grow wet. It was as if Mariah had, without explanation, shown him a secret part of life. He put a hand to his chest to feel his heartbeat, but there was only an insistent hollowness under his palm. Slowly, he reached out to touch the cat but when he did…pouf!
The creature vanished, and he felt the pain again, little circles of flame pressing into each of his eyes. He found himself screaming – making a terrible sound. Mariah bent down and touched his forehead.
“Now,” she said, her teeth very white in the flickering light. “Where shall we begin?”
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