Natasha Monkeybutt

"You know," I said, my voice a low growl, "I'm thinking that I'm not going to get my money back by standing around talking to you, Monkeybutt.  You can find out who lived here from the neighbours."
"And what if I don't want to talk to the neighbours, Mac?"
"Then you're not doing your job, Monkeybutt."  She winced a little that time.  "Something got murdered in here," and I gestured around me at the sticky red floor, "and that's a noisy business."
"And you'd know about that, wouldn't you, Mac?"
"I've heard the noises coming from the police interrogation cells, if that's what you mean?  From the cell adjoining, most often."  I stared into her eyes, daring her to deny it, and she stared right back, her eyes tiny cold ice chips hidden deep in her head by the layers of makeup.  For a moment I wondered if there might be a tiny powderdrift happening below one eye, but then she moved her head and her face was as smooth and glacial as before.
"Tell me who lived her, Mac, and you can go."
I almost pushed past her, but I could see her Forensics team coming down the corridor now, and while I reckoned I could just about outrun any of those fatties, the crap they were carrying would slow me down a lot if they just dropped it, which they probably would.  They had a roll of plastic sheeting as wide as a man (well, not as wide as one of them, obviously), little cases they carried by the handle, bigger cases that they wheeled along, plastic buckets that sloshed and some carrier bags that... that were take-out food by the smell.  I found myself slightly nauseated that they could bring themselves to stomach food at a murder scene like this, and I've been in this game for longer than you'd like to imagine.  I've seen men killed in inventive ways, and in boring ways, and sometimes I've contributed in some small way, to the execution of justice.  My mind bounced briefly back to watching a man fall from the roof of a hotel because he wasn't expecting me to appear from behind a heating vent, and then later of trying to get information out of him before his shattered ribs and punctured lungs did for him.  In retrospect, kicking him in the side to make him talk faster was probably counterproductive.
"Mac?"
I looked at Natasha again and decided to tell her what the neighbours would.
"I was sleeping at the time, and I never go out of my own flat anyway," I said.
"That's what the neighbours will say, Mac," she said.  "You're not a neighbour here.  You're not a neighbour anywhere.  Even the rats and cockroaches band together and form housing associations to get you evicted."
I nodded.  My living arrangements are unusual by most people's standards, but they work for me and people like Monkeybutt don't need to know anything about them.  "Fine, Monkeybutt," I said, and ducked.  My spine cracked like I was stamping on those wretched Housing Association cockroaches and pain shot up and down both my arms simultaneously, but my head just got below the sweep of her arm and she ended up slapping the doorjamb instead of me.  She said nothing, but I could see from the whiteness of her fingers that it must have hurt.  "Little Boy Blue lived here, the jazz musician.  He's a hep cat, and he might have been out working tonight, so this blood might not even be his."
"I see," she said nodding.  "And the eviscerated sheep?  You don't think the blood might be theirs?"
"I don't think for people who don't pay me," I said smoothly.
"So you don't think, then?"  The slap might have missed but that jab hurt almost as much.
"I've got a home to go to," I said, and she looked like she didn't believe me.  Little gasps of powder broke from her forehead like bonzai volcanic eruptions as she frowned, tiny craze lines showing me where the frown-lines should have been.
"Go then, Mac," she said.  "And keep your nose out of police business.  I'm shutting down all organised crime in this city, and I think you're a crime all by yourself."
"Feeling's mutual," I said, and had the pleasure of seeing yet more puffs of powder escape her face as she tried to look bewildered underneath all that make-up.

Little Boy Blue

The sunlight was weak and gray through the curtains, struggling to illuminate the den of vice within.  I was stood in the doorway, my piece in my hand and holes in my pockets.  I'd left the leather gun-holster behind at a pawn-store twenty minutes earlier, so I had no choice but to hold the gun.  It had given the bus-driver a bit of a turn, more because I could tell he wanted to throw me off the bus for they way I smelled.  But he relented and the rest of the passengers just resented me in silence until I got off at my stop and they broke out in spontaneous applause.  I hate bad winners.  I put a bullet in the bus's back wheel and walked off.
I looked around the room.  This was the last known address for Little Boy Blue, one-time jazz musician and trumpeter, now a little down on his luck, scraping the edges of the barrel, and pushing little bits of this and that for Mad Frankie and his Anger Management.  It was no kind of life for a real person, but Blue was a lowlife, the kind of scum that apologises for its existence when you stumbled across it behind the garbage cans.  He'd even offer to slit his own throat to save you having to get your own knife dirty.  He wasn't here now, all I had were two dead sheep, enough blood to bathe in, and a pathetic collection of paperback pulp novels.  Looked like Blue liked to read in his quiet time.
"MacArthur?"  The voice behind me actually sounded surprised, which in turn surprised me.  I turned, and found myself looking at the Head of Organised Crime Prevention, Miss Natasha Monkeybutt.
"Monkeybutt," I said, nodded with professional calm.  My hat slipped down over my eyes, and I had to push it back up onto my forehead with the barrel of the gun.
"You know it's not pronounced like that," she said, equally calmly.  "Thinking of committing suicide Mac?  We'd miss you."
"Sarcasm ill becomes a lady," I said, forcing a smile.  She recoiled a little, my teeth are on the black side of black.
"And murder ill becomes a private eye," she said.  "If that's still what you're pretending to be.  You don't fool me for an instant, you know, Mac.  You don't.  You like to think you're independent, but you still jump when Mad Frankie sneezes.  I know he's got a handler for you, and it's just a matter of time before we have a name.  And when we pin you down, we'll make you talk like a nun released from a seven year vow of silence standing in the House of Gigolos."
"I thought they closed that place down?" I looked around the room again while she was talking.  Something weird had gone on here.  Who had brought two sheep up six flights of steep, narrow stairs and then slaughtered them in Blue's little studio flat?
"I," she said, with emphasis.  "I closed it down Mac, just like I track down and close down all other kinds of Organised Crime in this city.  Batman's got nothing on me."
"Both your parents dead now, then?" I said innocently.  I wanted her to leave so I could get to finding out why the sheep had had to die.  Her face turned purple, and I thought for a moment that she was going to hit me.
"I think you'd know if my father had died," she said, tightly.  I nodded, he was the Pensioneer General, running the funds for pretty much every pension in the city.  His death would send shockwaves through the financial markets and probably start a run on the banks.  Didn't bother me though, my money was stashed away in a dirty sock under a filthy mattress in a small... well, that's probably all you really need to know about where I keep my cash.  It's pretty safe.
"This is a crime scene, Mac, you need to leave.  Now."  I could hear footsteps and the laboured breathing of the police department's finest officers coming up to smother the room in plastic and pull it apart, fibre by fibre, hunting for the answer in the details.  I nodded again, cursing inwardly that I'd not got there sooner.
"Yeah," I said.  "Looks like Blue's already skipped the joint, probably taking my money with him.  Little rat."
"You know who lived here?" Suddenly Natasha Monkeybutt was focusing on me, her eyes wide and glistening like a little girl who's just been told her parents have sold her for a trip to Antigua.
"Maybe," I said, edging past her.  She put out her hand, then thought better of touching me and pulled it back again.
"I think you should stay for a while, Mac," she said.  "It seems like you might have evidence on you after all."

The book club

"We have a question submitted to us!" Millicent Pede waved the slip of paper in the air like a flag.  She was standing on one of the small plastic chairs that the library put out for the children, and it was slowly deforming under her weight.  She wobbled gently.
"A question?" Suzie Fort adjusted her glasses, which were perched on the tip of her nose.  They barely clung now to the very tip, which was turned up very slightly and both lumpy and decidedly not straight higher up, a legacy of two decades playing rugby.  "Why would anyone ask questions of a book club?  We're meeting in a library, for pity's sake.  What moron didn't just ask the librarian?"
"Be nice!"  Millicent glared at Suzie, and Suzie tried to glare back, but realised that she'd adjusted her glasses to the point where she was seeing double.  To try and save face she took them off and started polishing the lenses on her lace cuff.  "Now ladies, I'm sure you're all dying to hear what the question is –"
"Harrumph," said Dr. Philbert, carefully pronouncing each letter in what he fondly imagined was a real word instead of an onomatopoeic rendering of the sound of someone clearing a clogged throat.
"You don't count," said Millicent.  The chair beneath her sighed and deformed until she was effectively stood on the floor again.  She tutted and stepped off the chair, which very slowly tried to pull itself back together.
"Ten quid says it's dead," whispered Dr. Philbert to Martia, the group's newest member.  She was a single mum of three and considered the book club to be her one opportunity to meet real people and have adult conversations every week.
"Fucking shagged," she whispered back, a touch of relish in her tone from using words she forbade around her children.  Dr. Philbert looked a little startled.
"The question, ladies," she said, pausing for effect.  The mangled chair farted a little as it tried to right itself, and Martia giggled.  "The question is: In which book can one find the character Arbutternot, and what is its species?"
"Do you mean Arbuthnot?" said Suzie, drawing her words out.  Her eyes were unfocused, and not just because of her glasses this time, and her fingers were twitching slightly as she thought.  "I seem to recall that there was a Duke Arbuthnot in Tis pity she's so poor."
"Was that a Selena Nightwich book?" asked Dr. Philbert. "I don't recall the character, but I'm sure I remember the book.  Was that the one with the bed of roses and the thirty-page seduction scene?"
"Yes," said Suzie, reddening slightly.
"Oh yes, I remember that.  That took all evening to get through, very tedious.  And just wrong, really.  Nightwich has no clue how to write a seduction scene, if I'd ever tried that one my wife when she was still aliv–"
"Well why didn't you?" Martia said.  They'd all heard all of Dr. Philbert's story about his dead wife, who had apparantly been the British answer to Mother Theresa when she wasn't confined to her sick-bed with gangrene.
"Because she's have been mortified!" said Dr. Philbert, his eyes opening wide and his eyebrows beetling around his brow in his excitement.  "My god, the very notion of buying a rabbit for her – and that's without letting the pet shop know what the intention is–"
"Not that kind of rabbit," said Suzie quickly, looking down at the floor.
"What?"
"Look," said Millicent, her voice cutting over a discussion that seemed destined to embarrass somebody.  "We have a question, and it doesn't sound like we've answered it yet."
"What's the question again?" asked Martia.  "I mean, what's the fucking question again?"
Millicent eyed her with a beady eye, but said nothing about her choice of vocabulary.  "The question," she said, brandishing the paper in front of her, is... is...."
"Is what?" asked Martia, just as Suzie said, "Stop messing about Mill!"
"The paper's changed," said Millicent, peering at it.  "I can't read this."
"Look at the cat," said Dr. Philbert, pointing at a sleek white cat that was standing in front of the nearby wall.  "Where did that come from?"
"Oh let me see," said Suzie, holding her hand out for the paper.
"It's a cat," said Martia, sounding unimpressed.  "I had one for Christmas once."
The cat attempted to walk forward, and head-butted the wall.
"Cats are for life, not just Christmas," said Dr. Philbert.
"These aren't words, Mill," said Suzie peering at the paper.  "Where's the one you read out the first time?"
The cat bumped its head against the wall again.
"It died on Boxing Day," said Martia.  "Cancer, the vet said."
"Oh," said Dr. Philbert, a little taken aback.
"They've changed all the signs too," said Millicent looking around.  "I can't read anything in here today!"
As the book club looked around, and slowly realised that they'd all forgotten how to read, the cat walked into the wall again, this time passing straight through and disappearing.

Absentee

I saw him leave and I hoped that he was a man on a mission and not an absentee father.  His eyes left first, greying out and filming over, milky like a three-week old cup of tea.  Then there was an hiatus, a momentary pause when it seemed like nothing was happening, time was suspended, holding fire in no-man's-land and singing carols in a high-pitched voice like a greyhound on helium.  Then his jaw dropped just a little, and he started mouth-breathing, a silvery snail-trail of drool leaking from the corner of his mouth where the herpes came on twice a year after his six-monthly visits to The Papaton.  If his mammy were still alive she'd have beaten him for that, like she beat manners into him when he was just a kid.  It seemed like every night I'd be lying in there in the darkness, scared to close my eyes in case I woke up dead, and I'd hear him in the other room, crying quietly into his pillow because the thrashing made it too hard for him to lie on his back.  And most nights I'd find myself getting up and going to him, knowing that if they caught me they'd not listen to a word I had to say, they'd just up and hang me, on the clothes-line out the back, or maybe from the branches of the apple-tree.  I did hear tell somewhere that a man hanged in an apple-tree for the wrong reasons gives off the best Hands Of Glory.  I'd lie on the side of his bed, putting an arm round him, and he'd shift his weight and bury his face against me, and his tears would mix with my sweat from the heat outside, and I'd wait till he fell asleep and then I'd go back to my own bed.  Because who leaves a child to cry on their own like that?
I asked the priest that question once, and he looked at me with the hatred the church has always reserved for those who think for themselves, and he said,
"Get yourself onto that hinky internet that I know and God knows you're stealing from the neighbourhood and find yourself all out about the Nicene Council.  And when you're done reading that, remember that it was me that told you all about it and save your scorn for those who've never heard it and yet practise it in every day of their miserable lives."
And that's where I found out that the church reserves the right to edit its holy texts, and while it might not do it so much as a whole the priest was right and many of the churchy-folk I saw around me were all too keen to edit the words to fit the lives they wanted to leave.
His hands stopped shaking after a while and I knew that he was all the way gone then, out there in the astral realm, wandering the clouds and dancing with the rainbows.  He would stare out of the window when it rained and we were children, and he'd look for the rainbows hiding in the raindrops.  I'd look too, but all I ever saw was grey, an endless outpouring of downpouring, leaden water from the skies that pushed the plants to reach back up to return it.  But he could find the rainbows, he'd point and laugh, but the rainbows somehow always skittered away when I tried to follow him, and all I'd get was a flash of red, or a glimmer of violet, and never the whole rainbow.  But he was happy, and it took his mind off the bruises and the welts.
I picked his hands up – they were so cold – and laid them in his lap.  He shifted slightly, and for a moment I thought he might fall off his chair, but then his spine stiffened and he was steady again.  I laid a kiss on his forehead, a reminder, a signpost to wait for his return, and then I slipped the latch on the door and loped out into the night, looking for the Papaton.  I heard the door click closed behind me, and I offered up a silent prayer that he'd be opening it when I knocked again, but the Gods were all silent that night, and though I'm sure that the prayer reached them in their brass cities, they didn't deign to tell me what their answer was.

The cat that walked into walls (II)

"It just says Arbutternot," said Mrs. Coldwell.  She had picked the piece of paper up from the nice young man at the reception desk on the way in, and had been puzzling over it ever since.  The library allowed the knitting circle to use one of their reading rooms because they were a nice, quiet, tidy group who paid the small monthly subscription in advance and could be relied upon to quell rowdy teenagers if the noise became too loud.  "I mean, what does that even mean?"
"Is it a type of margarine?" asked Hettie, deliberately pronouncing margarine with a hard g.  Every ignored that, as they'd already each sat through a lecture on how the substance was derived from margaric acid and it hadn't changed their pronunciation of it at all.  "It sounds like an advertisement to me."
"I've not heard of it if it is," said Mrs. Coldwell.  There was doubt in her tone and, as she was the expert rescuer of dropped stitches able even to fix a fifty-row mistake, the other ladies all made deferential noises and avoided looking at Hettie.  "But I suppose it could be one of the new ones.  Made from strange oils."
"Oooh," said Duckie, her voice low and thrilled.  "Oooh, I've heard about those strange oils, you know!  Radio three talks about them when they're supposed to be airing Mahler.  They can do bad things to your contraception."
"Perhaps it's something intended to be used with butter," said Daphne, who was willowy, wore oversized glasses and severe pant-suits and only knitted with the largest size needles because her eyesight was bad with or without her glasses.  She tended to produce sweaters for zoo animals and underwear for charities specialising in the obese or grossly deformed.  "A new kind of biscuit, perhaps?"
"Who let the cat in?" said Hettie, pointing by the door.  "I think a margarine is more likely than a biscuit, dear."  She emphasized margarine a little, still hoping that there would be someone daft enough to pick it up.
"What cat?"  Duckie peered under her chair, brushing her gypsy skirt out of the way and exposing her cleavage because her blouse was shockingly low cut.  People averted their eyes, more out of sympathy than prudery.
"I didn't think Radio Three played Mahler any more," said Mrs. Coldwell.  "But wouldn't it be one of those indigestible oils?"
"What, like Castrol?"  Daphne's tone suggested that she felt her biscuit suggestion had deserved a better reception.  "I thought I saw a cat too, though."
"Don't you give Castrol to children?" said Hettie.  "It's a white one, it's gone under the table, I think."
"I hope it's castor oil you give to children," said Mrs. Coldwell, picking the edge of the lace tablecloth up and looking under the table.  The table held a few small plates of crisps and nuts and a large stack of napkins so that salt or grease didn't get on the knitting.  Some weeks they splashed out a little and might have a red velvet cake or some macaroons, but this week they'd been uncertain whether Dolly would return or not.
"Hettie doesn't have children," said Duckie, "do you dear?  You can give them anything you like.  Where's this cat then?"
"There!" Hettie pointed a triumphant finger at the far wall, where the cat was walking slowly.  All eyes in the room fell on it, and a moment of silence descended.  Then the cat walked into the wall and banged its head with an audible thump and sat down heavily.
"Should it do that?" asked Mrs. Coldwell who only liked birds and thus was quite suspicious of cats already.
"Poor thing," said Hettie, not getting up.  "I've got allergies, you know."
"Probably all that margarine," said Daphne with just a smear of malice.  The cat stood up again, and walked once more into the wall, banging its head and mewling in annoyance.
"That can't be right," said Mrs. Coldwell.  "He could the wall there."
"She," said Duckie.  "You can tell on account of...." She tailed off, suddenly aware that everyone was listening intently.  "On account of, anyway," she said, daring them to challenge her.
"No, definitely male," said Mrs. Coldwell.  "There was this ginger tom that kept coming into the garden that was definitely male, and this looks like the same kind of cat to me."
"Oh really!" Daphne was indignant.  "Does it even matter?  Shouldn't we be helping the poor thing?"
The cat stood up again and walked once more into the wall, banging its head a third time.  Somewhere outside the room something chimed, a pleasant silvery sound that made all the women look round.
"Fire alarm?" asked Mrs. Coldwell.
"It's stopped now," said Hettie, a few seconds later.  "Probably not important.  Where's the cat gone?"
Though they looked into and under everything, the cat remained vanished from the room, as easily as it had appeared there.  And when they all sat down again to knit, they discovered that none of them could remember how.

The cat that walked into walls

Some speak of Macavity in hushed tones; others mutter the name Griddlebone and then cross themselves and look over their shoulders.  There are those who fear Mungojerrie, and those who worry intently about Grimalkin.  There are even, amidst the pasta-makers of Firenze, those who mutter the name Garfield and then lock their doors and shrive themselves in darkened rooms.  But no-one mentions Arbutternot, the cat who walked into walls
His name is not forgotten, and in the temples of Bast that survive to this day there are books in which the roll-call of famous and sacred cats is written, and Arbutternot is still listed there.  But no-one dares speak it, for though the others may be dreaded to be listening in, overhearing conversations that were better not discussed in front of cats, there is surety that speaking his name will summon him, pulling him from wherever he is beforehand to wherever the speaker is now.
For the problem with the cat who walked into walls is that the walls always gave way before him.

*

Dolly Hayfield was sixty-six and already fed up with retirement.  She had fourteen separate pensions from her various activities before she retired, and for the first three months she'd entertained herself by organising the various cheques and stipends that they provided and consolidating the various payments to happen on the same day and into the same account, followed by a myriad outflowing into other accounts, through shell companies and eventually into clandestine accounts where they accrued financial interest and sloughed off governmental interest.  Now that her money ticked like clockwork though, she was looking for something else to do

The local library had yielded two students who were unimpressed with her offer of help, possibly because she'd shaken her head at their homework problems and muttered 'Trivial!' not quietly enough under her breath.  When she'd started asking them if they could request harder homework and trying to show them how to solve polylogarithms in their heads they'd approached the head librarian and told him that she was attempting to touch them indecently.  Given that she felt that she'd been trying to reach through sloppily-cooked baked beans to find intelligence, she was inclined to agree and so had had to promise to leave them alone.  The hobbies and activities board only had three notices on it; an announcement for a weekly book-club meeting, a knitting circle, and a yellowed and smudged offer of tuition that she'd assessed as discrete prostitution.

The book-club let her attend two meetings and then asked her to leave.  She protested, and asked to know what the problem was, and was told that they liked their Mills & Boon romance novels and disliked her attempts to introduce foreign-language texts with over eight hundred pages.  The knitting circle had started off in a friendly manner as she'd not known how to knit, and the matrons and mothers had cooed over her, lending her needles and yarn (with a sharp look that she immediately recognised as meaning there will be payment for this) and teaching her the basic stitches.  When she returned the second week with a reasonable quality knit of the Bayeaux Tapestry they'd told her to get out and demanded money for the needles and yarn she'd been lent.

So when the book she'd proposed to the book club arrived and she opened it to learn that there were supposedly temples of Bast hidden around the world from where they migrated after the fall of the worship of her in the Egyptian empire, she decided that hunting down a lost temple might be just what she needed to keep her mind sharp and engaged.

She was still feeling put out about her rejection from the library's clubs though, and as a last act of vengeance she sent a couple of pieces of paper to both meetings, each containing the same word written in large, block capitals.

Arbutternot.

Horses

When Ketherin called, the horses came out of the forest.  Branches from the trees bent low and cracked, the noise like the creaking of old bones in winter.  They pulled themselves free, tar-like sap hanging greenly in long, dripping threads behind them, reminding her uncomfortably of the nerves and blood-vessels of the human body.  Then they pulled themselves together, each branch finding its own position relative to the rest, the green sap wrapping around them with whip-like motions, and crawling here and there across the surface, binding them into a kinetic whole.  Leaves flattened out and smoothed along the horses's flanks, and a white light arose in their otherwise dead eye sockets.  For a moment they stood their like deadwood sculptures on the edge of the forest, and then they sprang into life.
They raced across the meadow at the forest's edge, running first parallel to the forest, their leaf-flanks fluttering and sussurating in the wind of their passage, then turning sharply and racing in towards her.  The heavy wooden feet thumped down rhythmically on the earth, flinging soil free in scatters and clods, stamping round imprints deep into the soft ground.  They pulled up next to her, their wooden heads and faces tossing and harrumphing just like real horses, and as one they all turned their heads to look at her.
Ketherin swallowed, and reached out a tingling hand.  It touched first one nose then another, going amongst the horses and never missing one, knowing that they all had to be acknowledged or the forest would take its gift back.
"We ride," she said.  When only silence greeted her words she looked behind her.
Debrin had a hand to her mouth, stilling a cry of shock.  Her other hand clutched her long, brocaded skirts as though gathering them up to run, and Ketherin realised that she might still do that.  Next to her, Alasdair looked almost as apprehensive, but he was leaning forward, eager to touch the horses but wary of what Ketherin might say.  And Jube was silent and still, sitting on the ground, his eyes blank and a wet patch spreading beneath him.  Ketherin wrinkled her nose in momentary disgust, and then reminded herself that at least the horses weren't real.
But they are real, whispered the little voice in the back of her mind.  They might not be horses as you think of them, but they're here and they'll carry you.  And they won't get tired, and they don't leave hoof-prints like normal horses, and they don't need feeding like normal horses.  Aren't these better?  Hasn't the forest done you proud?
"Are they real?" said Alasdair, still leaning forward.  Ketherin noticed that he was balanced lightly on his toes.
"Of course they are," she said.  "They're here aren't they?  Touch them, gently mind."
"Oh...."  Debrin's voice escaped her throat at last, trembling and high-pitched.  "But are they... safe?"
Alasdair tiptoed forward, wanting to touch the horse but at full stretch in case it attacked him.  "I think they're safe," he said.  "Ketherin called them."
"You never said," said Debrin, her voice trailing off again.  "You never said."
"There wasn't a lot to say," said Ketherin.  "It's not like I get horses every time.  I get what the forest can spare, what it thinks is most useful."
"Why are there five horses?" said Alasdair, stroking the nose of the nearest horse now.  The horse had lowered its huge, hard, wooden head and almost seemed to be nuzzling into him.  "There's only four of us."
And that's if we all ride, thought Ketherin automatically.  She reached out a hand to Jube, who took it automatically and came to his feet slowly, stoically.
"I don't know," she said, knowing she was lying.  "I hope the fifth horse is to guide us."
"Guide us where?"  Debrin had lowered her hand from her mouth now, but still had her skirts clutched, ready to run.
"Away.  I don't know where we can go, but the forest might."  Ketherin regretted almost as soon as she said it, as the look of horror on Debrin's face returned and deepened.