The Glaring Page 8
He reached his front gate, bounded up the steps – his shopping bags long abandoned in his flight – fumbled for the keys to his front door and, finally, threw himself inside his house, slamming the front door.
Hastily bolting the front door, he threw up again all over his ‘welcome’ mat. He’d just remembered something about that couple’s car. It was a popular sports convertible; he knew the model well enough.
It had a fabric roof!
**
(xiv)
T. Lionel Cartwright watched the late-night news with a satisfied smile upon his face. The worst was over, it was official. A few weeks into the new year and the attacks were definitely getting fewer, with only half a dozen comparatively minor ones reported nationwide in the last week.
He’d had just about as poor a Christmas as anyone, which afforded him some sort of comfort (he’d been dreading the occasion), as Christmas events – markets, carol services and putting on the lights – had been cancelled everywhere and visitor numbers were down right across the country; a blessing for some people deprived of their relatives during the festive season, no doubt, but a disappointment for the majority, surely. The only increase in traffic had been people jetting away for the holiday, away from the cat-beset country with all its attendant problems.
So the worst was over; the attacks were getting fewer, there were fewer cats abroad anyway – captured or killed in their hundreds of thousand, millions by now – and it was much safer to go out and about, though one still exercised considerable caution if you had any sense. The killing of the courting couple in his home town was one of the last sightings of a true ‘glaring’ anywhere and there’d been no fatalities since.
The cat population was being systematically cleansed of the virus by eradication, by isolation and by a newly created vaccination: the fortuitous result of all that recent frenzied scientific endeavour. It would not be long before all was safe, a government spokesperson soothingly reassured the general public, live to camera, and cats would be cleaner, healthier and safer than ever before.
Lionel got up, having already put the telly off by remote control, and walked toward the main light-switch beside the living room door. He looked around to see if all was well (an old habit from when he and Ailish used to have candle-lit suppers), switched the light off, pulled open the door – and froze. Illuminated by the hall light, on the bottom step of the stairs stood a multi-coloured cat, four square. Lionel’s name for the cat lost all its comedic qualities in an instant: it was the moustachioed Schicklgruber himself!
*
The cat arched its back and spat as Lionel stepped back hastily into the living room to slam the door. But the cat anticipated his move and was inside the room before the door slammed shut. They were together now in the one room and with no obvious means of escape; the cat between Lionel and the door, as the latter retreated several steps towards the window.
There was something definitely preternatural about this cat, Lionel concluded, as he backed away slowly toward the French window (Was it locked? He couldn’t remember!). The bloody thing was toying with him. Why didn’t it attack? It was behaving like big cats do before they go in for the kill.
This cat wanted to bite and tear him to pieces and infect him or, rather, the parasite inside him did; it was obvious. But it made no move, it just stared at Lionel with a malevolence that was truly shocking. Lionel was terrified and more frightened now than at any other point since the crisis began. His legs were shaking and, though he didn’t, he wanted to wet himself. But what could he do to protect himself? Not taking his eyes off the cat, he mentally checked the room, left, right and behind him, for anything he could use against it. Nothing!
Suddenly, the utterly random thought of t. gondii-infected humans (such as he was about to be?) maniacally attacking all and sundry – like the creatures in the I am Legend movie he’d seen only the other night – flashed through his mind and he reacted to it instantly but at a level deep within his psyche. It was not an act of conscious volition at all, for Lionel was by nature pacific - timorous even - but something basic, something instinctual inside him (perhaps he was already a carrier?) made him act. He literally pounced at the cat, baring his teeth in the most hideous grimace imaginable and screaming ‘death’ at the top of his voice.
The cat instinctively backed away, it shrank from the totally unexpected behaviour, frightened for itself for once and for a spilt second it was on the defensive. And in that split second Lionel kicked it for all he was worth. His foot caught the cat’s left side and audibly broke several of its ribs. The animal was temporarily winded and stricken so he kicked it again. He kicked it again and again and stomped and jumped on it until the thing beneath him was a blood-soaked mass and mess of fur, skin and protruding bone.
He'd killed it, he’d killed his Nemesis. And looking down on the mess that was formerly the cat’s head – the glassy eyes, disarranged teeth and the broken, bloody face – Lionel was violently and spectacularly sick.
*
Now the crisis was definitely over. There had been a massive cull of cats throughout the country with dozens of mass cremation pyres dotting the countryside, reminiscent of the alarming BSE crisis.[5] Meanwhile, the population of ‘clean’ felines taken into protective custody in the numerous government-controlled cat sanctuaries were slowly being sold-on to the general public under the strictest of conditions. All cats, henceforth, had to be certified as t. gondii free; all cats had to have a chip implanted and be registered on a national computer base; all cats had to be given the newly introduced vaccination against t. gondii and have periodic check-ups to see if (highly unlikely now) they’d become infected. The authorities were mindful that this incredibly smart virus might very well mutate, and they weren’t going to be caught out again. Any cat found without a chip would be instantly taken out of circulation and killed.
There was just one thing still bothering Lionel Cartwright though. With the cat population so depleted, what was happening to the mouse and rat population? It was exploding surely and no doubt there was another potential human health risk in the offing. He’d read only the other day (why did he do it to himself, he wondered?) that rodents harboured a series of Hantaviruses that could and did infect humans – through contact with rodent saliva, urine or faeces – and that some strains of these viruses did indeed kill people, sometimes. With so many mice and rats around now – despite all the traps and poisons – this must be a worry. So far - he’d read - human infections of hantaviruses have almost exclusively been linked to direct human contact with rodent excrement, etc., but fairly recently a human-to-human transmission had been reported in at least one place in the world: South America. So, ‘unintended consequences’, thought Lionel, ‘unintended and unforeseen consequences’... who knows what might happen next?
‘I don’t know… if it’s not one thing it’s another these days,’ Lionel mused, sat in his study one night; a study illumined solely by the baleful glare of his computer screen. ‘What with so many people on the planet (far too many), so much urbanisation, so much encroachment on the natural world, rapid mass transportation, and too close a proximity to the ‘hot-spots’ of disease, it’s a wonder the world hasn’t already succumbed to a major pandemic of one sort or another. And everything is on the move of course – animals, vegetation, viruses, parasites and other exotica – off to the cooler poles or the higher land, and all because of global warming.’
A frisson of fear trembled through Lionel’s body and he mentally thanked the God that he didn’t really believe in that he and Ailish had had no children. The future looked so uncertain compared to when he was a child – and that was post-Hiroshima and the Cold War nuclear arms race no less!
And then a dreadful thought struck him. T. gondii had been described by one scientist – almost admiringly – as ‘one hell of a little guy’, one of the most successful parasites on the entire planet. It had ‘chosen’ the cat family as the only species in which it would reproduce and it ha
d ‘selected’ cat prey as a means of infiltrating its desired host. Well, it was being purged and ruthlessly purged from that population now, in Britain at least (and, imitatively, elsewhere in the developed world as well), so what would it do in response? It would jump species of course!
And that revelation filled Lionel with dread as, without any prompting, images of American pit-bulls and pit-bull type dogs flashed into his mind. He shuddered at the thought and of the legions of other snapping, biting and unpredictable breeds of dogs, and a long despairing groan escaped his lips.
The next day he went to a local sanctuary and bought himself a fully accredited disease-free cat – a blue Persian. He called it Gertie of Nivelles (its full and fancy name) after the seventh century abbess, Saint Gertrude, who happens to be the patron saint of cats, those with a morbid fear of rats and mice, and the mentally ill. Her saint’s day is the same as St. Patrick’s: the day that Ailish passed away, of course.
***
Author’s Note
The author wishes to affirm that, over a period of many years, he genuinely and truthfully witnessed all the descriptive passages written in italics. These things, then, he honestly saw and has faithfully reproduced herein; however, the understanding and particularly the interpretation of these events is another matter altogether.
* * *
[1] A BBC comedy series, One Foot in the Grave – early 1990 to late 2000. The series featured the exploits and mishaps of irascible pensioner Victor Meldrew, who after being forced to retire from his job, finds himself at war with the world and everything in it. His catchphrase was ‘I don’t believe it’ after yet another confrontation with the trials and tribulations of modern life.
[2]The Social Democratic Party was formed in 1981 when a group of ‘moderate’ UK Labour politicians broke away from their party because of its increasing ‘leftism’. In 1988 it merged with the Liberal Party.
[3] ‘Eight for a wish, nine for a kiss, ten for a bird you must not miss.’
[4] A male cat's penis has a band of about 120–150 backwards-pointing penile spines, which are about 1 mm long; upon withdrawal the spines painfully rake the walls of the female's vagina, which is a trigger for ovulation.
[5] The Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy crisis in the British beef herd (late 1980s and early 90s) when scrapie (a disease affecting the brains of sheep) jumped species and infected cattle through feed; it also infected humans in the form of a variant of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD). BSE reached its peak in 1992/3 with 100, 000 confirmed cases, but began to decline thereafter. The first known human victim of variant CJD died in 1995.