Weird Tales/Volume 30/Issue 6/The Keen Eyes and Ears of Kara Kedi
The Keen Eyes and Ears
of Kara Kedi[1]
An odd little story about a cat that was telepathic—by a member
of the French Academy
I HAVE been writing all the evening, alone in my room, alone in my little house in the uncomprehending city of Toulon, the lonely refuge I have crept into to get away from the world. When a man tires himself out, when he takes too strenuous a part in the various painful agitations of active life, he grows old rapidly. I have not yet lived fifty years on this earth, but my hair is white and my thoughts are as gray as ashes. . . .
I am writing in my room, all alone. Alone in a sense, that is. My black cat is with me. He is asleep, curled up in his armchair, which is an exact duplicate of mine. He and I spend a great deal of time together in these great, heavy twin chairs, upholstered in tan velvet. My black cat's name is Kara Kedi, which is Turkish for just that—I mean, for "black cat." I didn't waste a great deal of imagination in naming him. Kara Kedi was born in Turkey, at Stamboul, in the holy suburb of Eyoub. That was back in the days when I was deep in love with the Circassian girl. Ah, how blond her hair was, and how brown her skin was! And how sweet her kisses were!
But there is no burning passion in my cottage tonight. Kara Kedi's chair is comfortable, and he sleeps very soundly, so that I am really alone in my room, alone in my dreary little house. My little house is a gimcrack of a place, with a little garden that runs all around it. To the right and left are little gardens very much like mine, about tiny little houses very much like mine. My neighbor on the right is a very dirty, very polite, and very deaf old sailor. My neighbor on the left is a pretty little young woman, very charming and very candid, who is constantly laughing and rattling her bracelets, as she gambols about in her sunny little garden. She has a great many friends, all of them gentlemen, and I am afraid they do not all come merely for the sake of a look at her pretty face and the pleasure of hearing her silvery voice. But of course it isn't any affair of mine what they come for. And they are reasonably quiet about it, so that I scarcely know when they come and go.
At night, our part of the city is absolutely quiet. It is so still at night that even when the sea is calm I can hear it lapping lazily against the rocks. For the sea is not many feet away from me. I could see it from my windows, if my windows were not so low. But as it is, the cabins of the fishermen's families hide the sea away from me.
But tonight, for some reason or other, I can't hear a sound of any sort, not even the caressing whispers of the waves. It is too calm even for that. There is not a hint of a breeze in the air, not a ripple on the surface of the sea. The winds and the waves are asleep, quite as soundly asleep as Kara Kedi, my black cat.
Kara Kedi, in his velvet-upholstered armchair, is as completely motionless as if he were cast in bronze. I can't see his paws or his tail, or the exact shape of his head. He is rolled up into a tightish ball, with a soft outline of ink-colored fur. Kara Kedi is an enormous cat. I think he is probably the biggest cat I ever saw. You could scarcely call him fat. He is not one of those round, formless cats you see sometimes, who doze day and night because they have more fat flesh than they have energy. He is longer, larger-boned, taller on his feet, than the ordinary house-cat. When he crosses my garden, gravely, gracefully, but with unmistakable evidence of personality and power, to meditate in the branches of the great fig-tree at the end of my garden, my little neighbor on the left says he makes her nervous. She tells me that she is almost afraid of him, and since her zoological attainments are not extensive enough to include black panthers, she reproachfully calls him a big awful bear.
I am writing at this journal of mine . . . there is a great feeling of calmness and peace about me in the room and in the house . . . in the garden, and in all the quiet night that reaches out beyond. . . .
I discover that my pen is empty. I raise my head and reach out my hand, for the inkwell . . . Ah! Kara Kedi is not asleep any longer. His head has suddenly emerged from the placid ball of dark fur. His head moves upward and forward, and his glaring eyes fix themselves on the dim rectangle of the window. And I can see that his pointed ears have turned straight upward. He is listening with all his might.
"Kara Kedi, old fellow, is there something wrong out beyond that window?"
Kara Kedi is still motionless and silent. But I can see his ears twitch, in a gesture that tells me he has heard me, but implores me to be quiet. He is right. There is no reason why I should distract his attention from the faint and distant noises which may mean much, by the noisy futilities of human speech. . . .
They do mean much, I am sure of that. Something is wrong, mysteriously wrong. Kara Kedi rises upright on his four long, strong legs, his head held straight forward and his long tail standing straight out behind him. He has disdained the thousand-year tradition of cats awakened from a nap. He has not stopped to arch his back, to yawn, to stretch himself magnificently. There must be something ominous in the air, or at least it must seem ominous to Kara Kedi . . . perhaps it might seem less so to me. . . .
It is a serious matter in Kara Kedi's opinion; there is no longer any doubt about that! Kara Kedi descends from the armchair and walks toward the window. He walks resolutely, determinedly, like a strong nature meeting a crisis. When he left his chair, he did not leap down from the chair to the floor. He lengthened himself out, muscle after muscle, until he touched the floor with one paw, then with a second, then with a third, and a fourth. . . . I realize perfectly by this time that I must maintain an absolute silence. Kara Kedi's head moves forward till his nose touches the strangely disquieting window-pane. Then, very slowly, the great body swings around till it faces toward the wall which lay to the animal's left before. My windows are so low that I can see the great panther-profile now, standing out rather distinctly against the faint light of the window. I should not be able to see him so distinctly if the animal's hair had not suddenly risen to a perpendicular all over his body and begun, as I had seen it do once or twice before on very stormy days, to emit a myriad of tiny crackling electric sparks.
"Kara Kedi! Kitty! What's the matter with you?"
"Miau!"
It was not Kara Kedi's usual "miau" of inquiry, petition or complaint; it was merely an expression of impatience. Kara Kedi, so courteous on most occasions, is nervously irritated at my foolish prattle. I accept his rebuke, in all meekness. I shall not breathe another sound.
Kara Kedi's eyes are fixed on that left wall with glaring insistence. The eyes are two green flames of dazzling glory. All at once the great feline turns his head and gazes at me, and—it sounds supremely foolish—and I am unable to ward off a feeling of superstitious, dazed terror. I am as sure as Kara Kedi is that something ghastly is happening out beyond that wall. It is a feeling, nothing more. There is no trace of rational knowledge. . . .
Kara Kedi, phosphorescent from his tail to his mustache, moves entirely away from the window. Then he begins to creep straight along that left wall, as if he were following, step by step, some unknown being which moved or was moved slowly along on the other side of the wall. Kara Kedi is making no apparent use of his sense of smell. He is listening with all the intense keenness of his ears, and he is looking, looking with all his eyes. . . . The wall is covered with a plain gray paper, and I can't remember ever to have seen anything on that wall or that paper which had anything unusual about it. . . .
Oh—oh!
Kara Kedi draws himself together, and with all the power of his marvelous muscles he flings himself backward into the room, away from the wall. He runs around in a bewildered circle, his tail thrust out perfectly stiff. He looks this way and that for a place to flee to. I can see that he is driven by blind and agonizing terror. He is so troubled that his mind and his memory are not functioning; he has forgotten that I am there to guard and protect him as I have done so many times before. It is only after a long period of anguish and dashing madly hither and thither, that his dazed eyes chance to meet mine. The message of my presence readies his poor fuddled brain at last. And suddenly, like an animal hunted for prey, he flings himself toward me, he leaps to my knees, but he does not stop there. He crawls deep into my arms, up against my breast. He buries his head between my neck and my shoulder, but he is unable to resist the wretched fascination that keeps drawing his eyes toward that miserable wall, that wall of pain and horror.
And his trouble has taken possession of me. The frightened cat has driven his fear into the very marrow of my bones. I am paralyzed with craven foreboding. Like the cat, I am unable to move my eyes from the mysterious gray wall, the wall which is hiding from me some blood-curdling happening that I have not the courage to try to imagine. Kara Kedi trembles and shivers in the protecting grasp of my two cold hands. Then suddenly an even more terrible thing happens.
Kara Kedi tears himself free from my embrace, drops from my knees, leaps into the air three or four times and falls to the floor in violent convulsions. His throat is torn by raucous cries, cries which are no more like the familiar miauing of his normal life than the sinister gurglings of an epileptic in the midst of a seizure are like the healthy human voice. . . .
*****
I think I suffered a temporary period of derangement. I have a feverish recollection that I seized my revolver and stood a long time with the weapon pointed at the ominous wall, waiting for the wall to open and admit some shape of terror. . . .
My poor, pretty young neighbor, the giddy little person of accommodating virtue whose bracelets rattled so gayly in her sunny garden, is dead. They found her body this morning.
Nobody has the slightest inkling of what the motive of the crime may have been. The assassin does not appear to have taken anything. The poor little corpse still wears all its gaudy jewelry. Nor was there any sign of a struggle or of violence. An extraordinarily long gold pin, an ornament but a deadly weapon at need, was found driven into her body below the fifth rib. And the eyes of the dead woman, wide open and staring, are dilated with a horror that is one of the most dreadful things I have ever seen.
Everybody is mystified. Nobody saw anything, nobody heard anything. It is likely that the mystery will never be solved. Till the body was found, nobody had any suspicion that anything was wrong.
Nobody, that is, but Kara Kedi—Kara Kedi and I.
Kara Kedi followed me over when I went into the little cottage to look at the body. He glanced carelessly at the pathetic little corpse; then he looked away. It appears that dead people have no particular interest for Kara Kedi. But he did look at me again, with a strange earnest expression in his eyes.
Then he walked out of the open door, crossed the garden pensively, and moved out on a branch of the great fig-tree to meditate. To meditate—perhaps to ruminate his memories.
- ↑ Translated by Roy Temple House.