Dead Men's s Boots — читать онлайн бесплатно полностью

But I am now in a position to comment if I’m ever in a conversation about dismantled werewolves; because when the light clicked on, that was what I was looking at.

The room was full of cats, and they Ócatmanwere all asleep: on the floor, on the furniture, on the shelves, covering every surface in sight. The deep vibration was caused by their combined synchronous purring. I took an involuntary step backwards, recoiling from the implications of what I was seeing. And in that queasy moment, as I hovered on the cusp of a decision, a cat in the centre of the room, a big white-furred Persian lying on top of an antique roll-top escritoire, opened its eyes.

Then the cats around it did too, and then their neighbours and so forth, out from the centre in a spreading wave, like one vast creature sending a single instruction via an old and creaky nervous system that took its own sweet time getting the message through.

A hundred or more cats stared at me now, with ancient and inscrutable malevolence in their eyes.

It was deeply, viscerally nasty, but there was worse to come. The Persian mewled on a rising tone, and the two cats to either side of it pressed in and nuzzled its cheeks as if to comfort it. But that gentle contact became a firmer pressure, held for too long, and the flesh and fur of the three cats’ faces started to run together into a repulsive amorphous mass. The bodies followed, and more cats were crowding in now, jumping down from the dusty shelves full of old books of legal precedents or leaping up from the floor to join the press.

With a single muttered ‘Fuck!’ I pulled my coat wide open and hooked my whistle out of the inside pocket. It occurred to me – fleetingly – to back out and bolt the door again, but what good would that do? When these cats coalesced into the creature they were going to become, doors weren’t going to hold it.

The three cats in the centre were gone now. The spherical mound of pulpy flesh they’d become had a rudimentary face.

The mound rose from the desk as more cats added themselves to the base of it, deliquescing more quickly all the time as though the process was gaining its own momentum. Working from memory, I found the whistle’s stops and started to play.

I’d long ago forgotten the tune I’d composed to get the drop on Scrub the last time we’d met, and in any case I couldn’t be sure that this creature was the same loup-garou that had once worn that name and shape.