Empire Falls

woman’s familiar, and Miles, who noted that the cat’s sudden appearance often coincided with the mention or advent of Mrs. Whiting, was inclined to agree.
    Since Timmy had no testicles to snip, she’d been returned home intact and relegated to the basement with her litter box and a week’s supply of food, to see if this dark confinement might provide her an opportunity to reflect that her new owners weren’t to blame for any past inhumane treatment. It did not. In fact, the animal did not take kindly to imprisonment, which might have reminded her of the inside of the burlap bag. There was a small gap between the floor and the bottom of the basement door, and from the top step Timmy was able to reach underneath and rattle the ill-fitting door about as loudly as a full-grown man would have been able to do with his hand. At first no one had been willing to believe that a small, angry cat could make such a racket all by herself, but every night Timmy shook the door until she was let out; then, to celebrate her freedom, she began shredding the upholstery on the dining room chairs. At the end of a week, Mrs. Whiting instructed the housekeeper to go to the drugstore and buy herself and Cindy and Mrs. Whiting earplugs. Good ones.
    That night, even with the earplugs, they’d heard Timmy screaming and rattling the door to the basement, but sometime after midnight the noise ceased, and the three congratulated themselves that the animal’s spirit was finally broken. The next morning, when the housekeeper came into the kitchen to release the—she imagined—now tame and chastened cat, she got the shock of her life. Indeed, she could not quite believe what she was staring at. The animal’s head, blood-fanged, was upside down on the tile floor under the bottom of the cellar door, its two front paws seemingly pinned to the floor when the door had come crashing down. That was the conclusion the poor housekeeper came to, based on the evidence of her senses. She knew, of course, that the door couldn’t have come crashing down. This door swung open and shut on two copper hinges just like all the others. But with the cat’s bloody head and paws motionless underneath it, the door appeared to have operated like a garage door, rising into and descending from the ceiling. It had apparently come slicing down like a guillotine when Timmy had attempted to cross the threshold. So powerful was this optical illusion that the woman’s reason was unable to conquer it until Timmy moved. Alas, the resulting apparition of a now squirming, bloody, disembodied, undead cat head sent the woman shrieking from the house.
    What had happened, it was later deduced, was that the poor woman had interrupted Timmy’s escape. Since midnight the cat, ignoring her bleeding gums, had methodically chewed her way through the bottom of the door. The housekeeper had entered the kitchen just when the hole had gotten large enough for Timmy, squirming on her back, to poke her horrible head and part of one shoulder through. At the housekeeper’s sudden appearance, she’d frozen in surprise.
    It had been, no doubt, a ghastly sight, though only slightly more ghastly than the one Miles was treated to now. Timmy’s teeth were not bloody from having chewed through a door, but she’d pulled her lips back and was making sure Miles could see every razor-sharp tooth. Her fur was standing straight up, and her back was arched in the manner of B-movie cats when a ghost, visible to pets but not humans, has just entered the room. Miles, no ghost, instinctively backed away.
    “Oh, Timmy,” Cindy Whiting said, risking her precarious balance to bend down and stroke the beast. “Quit that. Can’t you see it’s only Miles?”
    At this, Timmy proceeded to hiss and spit even more emphatically. As Miles, who knew from experience that the owners of savage pets seldom offered much in the way of protection from them, began looking around for a weapon, he heard a distant bell ringing somewhere in the rear of the house. When he turned back toward Timmy, the cat had vanished.
    “That’s Mother,” Cindy said, nodding in the direction of the bell. “She must’ve heard you pull up, and now she’s impatient.”
    Miles was still scanning the room for Timmy the Cat.
    “She’s waiting out in the gazebo,” Cindy explained. “She made me promise to bring you straight out, so you go along.” She began to negotiate a slow, awkward turn with her walker. “I’m