The cat was gray, like all cats, like a tendril of smoke or an area of uncertainty, and she had fallen to calling him Torquemada for the inquisitive expression he wore while eviscerating his prey. He brought her all the tortured corpses when he finished with them-- every sparrow and spider, each garden snake and squirrel, laying them casually at her feet as if he had known her for years, and October accepted them as naturally as she had the cat himself when he'd appeared, with neither pleasure nor dismay, because like him, they were a fact, and nothing more. She saved the parts she could use, hanging them on strings to dry in her sunny kitchen, and the cat watched her do it, with eyes that were the color of a harvest moon.
Strays had passed through October's life before-- indeed, something about her and her huge old house on the outskirts of town seemed to attract them; the lost and lone of nearly every species, humans included. They came and went like the tides, like the seasons. But none had been so bold as Torquemada. None had stretched out in her black satin bed and refused to move when she came to lie down herself; none had dared to steal food from her plate or to touch her paintings before they were dry. None had spent so much time staring at her.
And certainly none had dared to draw her blood.
She'd been lying in the bath when it happened a week after the cat's arrival-- half asleep, one hand dangling over the side of the tub. Silken fur had brushed her palm, and an instant later the claws came like tiny blades to open her wrist, and October had snapped awake to find the cat lapping her blood from the tiled floor. A different woman would have screamed, perhaps, or thrown water at the beast to drive him away, but October merely watched him watching her, a sardonic smile pulling at her lips. "Take care it doesn't poison you, little one," she'd said.
The incident was of little importance, for October had no fear of bloodletting. But she would not allow it to happen again, despite the strange hunger she sensed in Torquemada, the desire to lay claim to her that went beyond an ordinary cat's possessiveness. Her hospitality had limits, after all. She would share her home readily enough if it amused her, but she gave herself to no one.
The cat, to his credit, seemed to understand this and to accept it, which was more than could be said of the man at the back of the club tonight, the young skinhead with the piercing eyes who'd been, of late, trying to accost her as she left the stage. October knew what he wanted, and because she'd had no wish to discuss it with him on evenings past, she had touched the amulet at her throat and summoned its power-- combined with forbidding looks-- to place doubts in his mind. But she'd sensed that he carried the courage of his convictions, and would not be so easily dissuaded for long.
Earlier tonight, the cards had warned her of impending confrontation. Now she sighed, lit a clove cigarette, and debated whether to go on for her last set of the night or to slip out early. The mere idea of speaking to the man had made her tired, as though she had already allowed him to drain off her energy. She twined a glossy black curl around one slender finger as she studied herself in the lighted mirror. There were shadows around her sultry gray eyes, the faintest beginnings of lines etching themselves in her ivory flesh.
"You've been spending too much time in this world," she whispered to her reflection, and closed her eyes, her decision made. She would go home. She would leave this world for a time. She would sojourn in the dream country.
But first she would dress in one more costume and go out and dance her last set, because she was not afraid of this man, and because she was supposed to be costing him money-- not the other way around.
October enjoyed making her audience uncomfortable, enjoyed disturbing them with things they'd never known they found erotic, and this was why she chose to work at a place like the Centerfold Lounge, with its tourist/redneck/fratboy clientele, rather than at one of Orlando's underground fetish clubs, where her aestheticism would have been more appreciated. Tonight she had a partner as she slunk about the stage like a creature born of nightmares; a red-legged tarantula that had been given to her as payment for a tarot reading the week before. She saw several of the men nearest the stage shifting awkwardly in their chairs as they watched the enormous spider creeping slowly over her body, and it made her laugh aloud as she took their money. At some point, perhaps tiring of the dance, the tarantula dropped to the rickety stage and scuttled away, and a murmur of restrained alarm rippled through the crowd. When she was satisfied with the number of bills whispering and crackling against her sweaty skin, she rose to her feet and stalked away, pausing only to collect her discarded dress before she disappeared behind the chintzy beaded curtain at the back of the stage.
She hadn't seen the skinhead in the crowd this time; hadn't felt his icicle gaze, but she knew he hadn't gone. When she found him waiting for her outside the dressing room door, the tarantula cupped in his callused hands, October wasn't surprised. The cards had told her this was coming. She lit a cigarette and looked at him, taking in his clean-shaven scalp, his white bootlaces, his swastika tattoos. None of it offended her. But he was standing in her way.
"I think this belongs to you," he said, holding out the spider, which squirmed as though anxious to be free of his touch. When she made no move to take the creature from him, it leapt to the floor and darted away again.
"No," October replied coolly. "She belongs to herself, as do we all."
He blinked at her, obviously thrown off guard, then shook his head once, dismissively, as if shaking off a small, bothersome insect. He tried again. "That was some show you put on."
October simply looked at him and said nothing.
"What's your name?" he persisted, trying a smile.
"That you know already."
"Oh, come on. I mean your real name."
"For you to pronounce it correctly, I would have to pull out your tongue," she told him, and his smile faltered for an instant, then widened.
"Hey, whatever turns you on. I'd just like to get to know you."
October closed her eyes for a moment, letting one hand drift upward to caress again the amulet inside the collar of her trenchcoat. When she looked at him again, her eyes were like jagged pieces of flint. "I'm leaving now," she said.
The skinhead's smile dissolved; his hands curled into loose fists, seemingly of their own volition. "Don't be like that," he said in a lower voice. "I just want to talk to you, for Christ's sake."
His petulance made him appear suddenly very young, and so October's next words were spoken more gently: "You couldn't possibly say anything I'd care to hear." She started past him, but he reached out and caught her arm, his fingers biting deeply into her flesh, and pulled her close. His scent filled her nostrils-- stale beer and sweat and menthol shaving cream-- and for a second she thought she would vomit from the combination of its foulness and her fury.
"Witch," he hissed, his hot breath brushing her ear. "You've gotten inside my head somehow. It's up to you now whether you want that to be a good or a bad place to be." He pressed himself against her, trying to pin her to the wall, but October twisted in his grasp and thrust the tip of her cigarette into the side of his neck, into the juncture of the iron cross tattooed there. If she could hold it there long enough, she thought she might be able to burn through his jugular vein.
The skinhead cursed and released her, and October laughed and dragged deeply on the cigarette, tasting the sharp, sweet flavor of seared flesh mingling with the spicy smoke. "I'm leaving now," she said again, and this time-- perhaps aware of the people beginning to stare at them-- he let her pass.
Not until she was outside the lounge and across the parking lot-- not until it took her three attempts to get her key into the door of her black Barracuda-- not until she stopped and looked down at them did October realize that her hands were shaking.
It was not fear. October could count on one hand the number of times in her life she had experienced actual fear, even as a child. And certainly she had encountered men at the club who were unpleasant, even violent. She could not have said what it was about tonight's exchange that had unsettled her, save that it had come at a time when her reserves of strength were low. And, she acknowledged, perhaps there was something in the word "witch" that had plucked at a string in her soul. That word had killed so many of her ancestors.
She let herself into the cluttered labyrinth of her darkened house, nearly stumbling across the threshold as something twined itself sinuously about her legs. It was the cat, Torquemada, thrusting his body against her just as the skinhead had done, pushing as if he meant to knock her down. October was not in the mood. She bared her teeth and hissed at him, speaking a warning in his own language, and the animal's eyes grew huge, but he didn't move away from her, and so she shoved him with her foot, sending velvet paws out from under him and stealing some of his fluid grace, as he had done to her. The cat lashed his tail and glared at her defiantly.
Tiring of the duel, October retreated to her bedroom and closed the door, ignoring the plaintive cry that sounded after her, the questing gray paw that reached beneath the door, groping this way and that. There had been enough impingements upon her for one night.
She picked up the crystal decanter on the table by the bed and spilled some of its contents into a goblet of carved jet. The wine was a rich, dark violet, the color of dusk, and had been seasoned with various arcane herbs that brought visions and a deep, cleansing sleep. She drank off half of it in one draught, savoring its bittersweet taste, then set the cup down and moved around the room lighting candles-- white for peace, red for strength, black for the universe and the night. Their light would show her which path to take in the land of dreams, and when she was ready to return, it would lead her home.
She drew off her clothes and sat on the floor before her full length mirror to comb out her thick, tangled hair. She counted out one hundred strokes, each one more languorous than the last, letting the woman in the mirror hypnotize her with heavy-lidded eyes the color of Torquemada's fur.
At length she rose, feeling as if she were already beginning to leave her body, and laid it carefully on the bed, spreading its glittering hair out over the pillow like a halo. Her chest rose and fell only once before she slid sideways out of the world and into the dream country, where the mournful calls and cries of a demon cat echoed eerily across the twisted landscape.
Something was wrong.
Deep within her slumber, across the miles of ever-shifting psychic terrain that separated her from the world outside her skull, October sensed a disturbance in the atmosphere of her house; a sullying of the air her body breathed. She had to return, though it was far too soon. She had not yet found the strength she had come here to seek; nevertheless, she could not leave her lifeless flesh vulnerable to whatever had chosen to visit itself upon her house in the dead of night. She turned toward the source of the wrong and willed herself back into the waking world.
The first thing she became aware of was the caustic odor of gasoline, and her half-conscious mind immediately divined the danger she was in. Her eyes snapped open like a doll's, and there was the skinhead from the Centerfold Lounge leaning over her bed, his face a drunken mask of determined hatred and thwarted desire. He started when he saw she was awake, his entire body seizing in a nervous twitch, and the rusty gascan dangling from his hand tipped a single shimmering drop of distilled death onto the satin coverlet.
He recovered from his surprise more quickly than she, and a painful-looking grin spread itself across his face, as if the muscles had been snagged on fishhooks. "You like to burn things, cunt?" he spat. "Well let's see how much you like this."
He snatched up the candle nearest the bed and raised the can. October stared up at him, thinking that this was it-- she'd allowed him to follow her home and now she would have to keep him; his face would be the last thing she was ever going to see, the image she would carry with her through eternity. Still she felt no fear-- only a stinging, bitter regret, like the flavor of wormwood at the back of her mouth.
But before the man who would be her killer could finish what he had come to do, Torquemada materialized from a shadowed corner of the room and flew at the intruder with an earsplitting howl, a diminutive deus ex machina, ripping at his skin with claws like tenterhooks and teeth like broken glass. The man let out a strangled scream and beat at the cat, dropping the candle, but Torquemada only dug in deeper the more his victim thrashed. Blood and gasoline spattered the walls and the floor.
"Call it off!" the skinhead screeched in October's direction. "Just get it off me and I'll leave, I swear!" October could hear the pain in his voice, and it made her smile.
"I don't control him," she said.
"You're lying!" the skinhead snarled. "You fucking witch, now I'm gonna kill you slow--" He lunged at her, his pale blue eyes full of rage, and at that instant Torquemada sank his claws deep into one of those eyes and ripped it out. It landed on the bed, the optic nerve trailing wetly behind it, and split open like an over-ripe plum, the vitreous humor seeping slowly out into the black satin.
The skinhead let out an inhuman shriek and crumpled to his knees as if he'd been shot. The gascan slipped from his hand, its contents spilling over him and pooling at his feet. He clutched and probed at his empty eye socket in disbelief, and his hand came away slicked with the blood that ran down his face like tears. He held it out to October. "Look at what your fucking cat did to me," he said.
Torquemada had released the man and leapt clear when he began to fall. Now he was stalking towards him again, his back arched and ears laid flat against his skull, looking every inch like a witch's cat. The skinhead watched him with his one remaining eye and reached slowly inside his flight jacket. "I'm not finished with you yet," he said to October. "Not by a long shot. But first I'm gonna take care of that cat." He brought out a small, snub-nosed pistol and aimed it at Torquemada, who narrowed his eyes and hissed as if he understood. The skinhead hesitated, turning his head slightly this way and that, trying to compensate for the missing eye, and in the seconds this bought Torquemada, he picked up the fallen candle in his mouth and launched himself at his enemy.
The skinhead's gas-drenched clothes burst immediately into flames and he shrieked again, a sound so loud and agonized that October-- who shrank from nothing-- covered her ears. Torquemada's fur had caught fire, too; the flames were voracious and undiscriminating, devouring man and beast alike, but the cat made no sound.
October watched them burn for innumerable seconds, until the fire began to spread across the room and she was forced to run. She ran naked from her house and out into the humid night just as it began to melt into dawn, and when she was safely away, she fell to her knees and buried her face in the dewy grass, so she could pretend that was where the wetness on her cheeks had come from.
The fire hadn't taken much; only the bedroom had been lost before the house itself had contained and quenched the flames. The aged beams and boards had been so imbued with October's spirit, and with the magick she wrought within, that they would not allow themselves to be destroyed. October sealed off the ruined room with the nameless man's bones still inside, after sifting carefully through the ashes and finding nothing that resembled a cat. Now she sat in the parlor, on the big, soft couch she supposed she would use as a bed from now on, idly shuffling her tarot deck and marveling at the fact of her sadness. She pulled a random card from the deck and turned it over in her hand. The Lovers.
She had tried to paint today, but her brush would give life to nothing but sleek gray feline shapes, and eyes like harvest moons. She hadn't wanted to read, and she knew that sleep would be impossible for a long time, and so she had spent most of the day gazing out the window, watching the progression of the sun from one side of the sky to the other. Now the night was being born, and thunder was rumbling faintly in the distance. October spread the cards across her lap and turned over another one at random. Again, The Lovers. She frowned and flung the cards across the room in sudden, pointless anger, watching as they fluttered through the still air like frightened birds and landed face down...all save one. She looked at the image of the man and woman, at their joined hands, and she thought she would scream.
Something soft touched her shoulder.
October turned her head, and there was the cat that she had watched go up in flames not twenty-four hours before. The fire still flickered in his luminous eyes as he stared at her, and October stared back.
"Torquemada," she breathed.
The cat began to purr at the sound of his name. October reached tentatively to stroke his back, and as she did the cat raised one velvet paw, unsheathed his claws, and opened her wrist for the second time.
October didn't pull away. She closed her eyes and let him drink, his rough tongue scraping the wounds wider and wider. She owed him this.
Perhaps it was the simple relief of knowing that he wasn't really gone, or perhaps the cat's saliva was narcotic. Whichever it was, October soon found herself back in the dream country. Torquemada was there with her.