Cat Tales Issue #1 Page 16

  Then it slept as the moon shone down on us.

  “There is no Society of Secret Cats,” I said sadly to Jaela.

  “Who knows,” she said. “If the Azdaja thought it was worth pretending to be one of them, then maybe there is.”

  “When you go back to your own dream, you’re going to be a little girl again, aren’t you?”

  The great goddess of sunshine smiled at me and scratched me behind the ears. I rolled over, and she rubbed my belly.

  To be petted by sunshine itself is a fine thing.

  After a time, a long time or a short time, she lay down to sleep beside the Aranea, and I lay next to them both, purring.

  We woke inside Jaela’s childhood dream. Jaela flinched and peeped with startlement, from the spider-kin next to her, then remembered what had happened, and reached out a hand. The Aranea climbed up onto it, then cast a web up into the corner of the room, skipping up into the shadows there.

  If I were as squishy as that thing, I would be nervous about being held by a six-year-old, too.

  Later, we woke to real waking, and the Aranea flickered into the real world, up in her corner, lazing. From time to time, she would go looking for flies or other things that crawled in Jaela’s room unbidden.

  And from time to time in dreams, I would see her and her strange catlike hairs laughing at me, chasing down other, more hurtful nightmares, winding them up in thread, and drinking them dry.

  You cannot tell the good of a dream by the way it seems or even the way it smells. You can only tell the good of it by what it will do.

  Excerpt from The King of Cats (coming soon!)

  by De Kenyon

  The dome shimmered with blue fire that burned brighter whenever a nightmare flew into it. The nightmares exploded into blue sparks and were absorbed by the dome, which spread further and further along the ground toward the three of them. The Aranea clutched my fur, both shivering with fear and shaking with rage. I checked to make sure the Mark of Undreaming still glowed on her head. I did not want her to dissolve into a shower of sparks, nightmare that she was. Nodoji crossed his arms over his torso, secretly checking his weapons. He looked at me, and his tightly-curled tail wagged twice, then stopped.

  As the dome grew bigger and bigger, it melted the snow on the ground with a hiss, leaving behind dead leaves that turned into dirt, sank into the soil, and sprouted with new grass.

  As for myself, Ferntail the Cat, now transformed into an upright, dreamer’s form with my fine cat’s head, tail, and opposable thumbs, I have never been so afraid to see the early return of spring.

  “Charge,” I said calmly, and Nodoji and I walked forward into the dome.

  But I get ahead of myself. It all started with the arrival of a dog.

  It is one thing to defend the dreams of a little girl. Jaela was my human, and I was her cat, and for a long time that was all I had needed to know. I defended her dreams; she petted me; I thought everything was good.

  But the world is wide, and the dangers to dreamers are many, and while I was particularly skilled at defending the dreams of my mistress, I was unable to defend her from other things, and so one day, I was glad to hear Jaela’s family decide to adopt a dog.

  What do dogs have to do with dreaming? you might ask. You might as well ask what cats have to do with dreaming! If cats are the defenders of children’s dreams, then dogs are the guardians of the dreams of the house in which they live.

  But houses don’t dream, you might say, with a laugh in your voice. And yet you know it to be true: some houses are good ones, in which the dreams of everyone in the house are easy to guard. Other houses are bad ones, into which nightmares come easily, upsetting everyone and causing fights, even during the daytime. I have heard of many houses so overridden by nightmares that the whole family fell to pieces, the parents going separate ways, the children moved back and forth between them—all because the house itself had to be escaped somehow. Some houses are like poison.

  For some reason (which had nothing to do with my defense of Jaela’s dreams, of course), our house had become such a place. Every night, the nightmares tried to attack her, and every day, her parents argued and fought and said painful, sarcastic things to each other. They did not know it, but their house itself was having nightmares, and so, despite what you might think, I was relieved to overhear them saying that they were leaving to pick out a dog.

  The three of them left the house together, the mother locking the door behind her. She peeked through the little window in the door and said, “Ferntail, watch the house and make sure no burglars come inside.” Then she giggled, an unpleasant, nervous giggle. Her face disappeared from the window, and I heard her footsteps as she walked away, then the slam of her car door, the sound of the engine purring as they drove away. The house was a bad one, but the car was a good one, and the only time the three of them did not fight and snip at each other was when they went for drives.

  As soon as they were gone, the Aranea crawled out from the hallway, upside-down along the ceiling. I have never asked her name, and she has never told me one. Being “the Spider-kin nightmare of the subtype Aranea who lives at Jaela’s house and bothers Ferntail” seems to be enough of a name for her. I should chase her out, but she has helped me defend Jaela from all kinds of nightmares, and it is good to have someone to talk to during the day. In all honesty, she is my friend, although sometimes I tease her.

  The Aranea said, “I thought they would never leave.”

  “It’s the house,” said I. “It does not want them to get a dog. It tried to keep them here.”

  “What a horrible place,” said the Aranea, crawling along the ceiling until she reached the light fixture, a plastic-and-glass creation that was supposed to look expensive but instead was covered with peeling brass paint and looked like the light fixtures in every other house on this street. It was possible to make such a place into a good home without a dog, but Jaela’s parents didn’t have the trick of it. The Aranea spun her web across the lights, hoping to catch a few annoyances as they tried to break into the house through the gaps around the bottom of the front door. “What kind of dog do you think they’ll get?”

  “A big one,” I said firmly. “I heard the father say it. A German Shepherd or a Rottweiler. A big, strong dog that will defend the home.”

  “Guard dogs,” the Aranea said, snootily. “All those are good for is defending from other humans. They should get a companion dog, like a Chihuahua.”

  I turned away from the Aranea and started bathing myself. “A big dog,” I said, “would scare off a certain silly Spider-kin that I know. And good riddance.”

  “You just don’t like Chihuahuas.”

  “I like Chihuahuas just fine. It’s the Chihuahuas who don’t like cats. They thinkthey can do all the protecting in the house. As if you could just bark a little girl’s nightmare away!” I began bathing my tail. This was an important, delicate procedure, and I didn’t like to be interrupted.

  “I hope it’s a Chihuahua,” said the Aranea.

  I looked up to make a sarcastic comment, but she had caught something: a bad mood, in the shape of a small fly, had become entangled in her web, and she was eating it, vomiting digestive juices all over it as it struggled. Unlike real spiders, the nightmares known as Spider-kin eat their prey while it is alive, crushing them to death with their powerful jaws as they squeeze their dissolving innards out like toothpaste. It’s quite disgusting.

  I turned back to my tail, but I was too nauseated to keep licking it tidy, so instead I moved to a sunny spot on the kitchen table and lay down for a nap.

  Inside the dome, the air was thick with steam, from the evaporated snow and the fast-growing plants. They were growing so quickly that they tangled over my boots when I hesitated.

  “Keep moving,” Nodoji barked.

  I stumbled and ripped my boots free, then shook a clinging vine off my sword. Fortunately, we weren’t far from the rode, and the plants were slower to grow up between the paving-
stones, so the road was a kind of short lawn in between the twisting jungles surrounding it.

  We followed the road toward the Capital of Dreams. When we had come here earlier, it was on the ground, like a normal city. The buildings were old-fashioned, with roofs made out of dark wood shingles and white plaster walls decorated with dark wood braces. The streets were narrow and covered with cobblestones, and the thick trees looked like they were having a contest to get ready for Christmas, all of them dabbled with clumps of sparkling snow.

  Today the city before us grew out of a pile of twisted worms as big as houses, and rose on thick, black metal poles above our heads. The buildings looked like something out of the future, all bright metal, shining glass, and sleek lines. The old buildings and streets had fallen away, and lay on the ground in piles of rubble that the giant worms crawled over, trailing slime. The plants grew under the city as fast as anywhere else, but the worms’ bodies crushed the giant trunks of the trees to the ground as fast as they grew.

  The dome shimmered bright blue above us.

  Inside the city, the Wormspeaker whispered in the ear of the King of Cats, telling him that his dreams were beautiful things when instead they were worse than any nightmares going on outside.

  It was a horrible thing, bigger than any cat (or dog, or Spider-kin) could be expected to fight: people such as we were made to defend (or attack) people and houses, not dreams that covered the entire Capital of Dreams, and even more space in reality, turning normal folk into horrible, cruel people that spread the nightmare even further with every passing dream, until all the dreams collapse, and the world with them.

  But sometimes that’s how it goes. What were we supposed to do, lay our weapons down and purr it better? I think not.

  “We’ll have to get a rope up under the city and climb it,” Nodoji said. He carried such a rope over his shoulder. The rope was made of black silk, and the hook at the end was painted black, to keep it from shining in the dark.

  Who would have thought his skills in stealing food off the counter would come to such good use now?

  About the Author

  Every summer as kids, we would host one group of cousins or another and jump off hay bales, create mazes by crawling the patterns through the tall grass, and steal green apples out of the garden. We also branded calves, killed chickens, and stole steak knives to threaten skunks with. But that’s growing up on a farm for you.

  Now I write fantasy, science fiction, and horror—and most of it comes from the worlds that I created as a farm kid, one way or another.

  I live in Colorado with my husband, daughter, and cat.

  Other Works by the Author

  Find the lastest updates and releases at www.WonderlandPress.com, or at www.DeKenyon.com. You can also sign up for a no-more-than-monthly update here.

  Exotics #1: Floating Menagerie

  Exotics #2: Xanadu House

  Exotics #3: The Subterranean Sanctuary

  Short Story Collection:

  Tales Told Under the Covers #1: Zombie Girl Invasion & Other Stories

  And numerous short stories.

  Reviews are always appreciated.

  If you liked this story, please consider going to the location where you purchased it and leaving a review.

  As always, this story is dedicated to Lee and Ray, without whose love none of this would be possible.

  Bundle Copyright

  “Cat Tales Issue #1” copyright © 2019 Kydala Publishing, Inc.

  Published by Kydala Publishing, Inc.

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