It was, quite simply, the elixir of wellbeing.
Library Cat walked the length and breadth of the Royal Mile for several hours. It’ll be gone soon, it’ll be gone soon, it’ll be gone soon. Something, and he wasn’t sure quite what, was getting the better of him. He skulked up past the gallant City Chambers and eerie Mercat Cross where foreign tourists had already started to congregate for the day’s first underground ghost tours. Several people spotted him and came over to tickle him.
“Here, puss puss puss puss!”
But Library Cat just walked on, not even stopping to see who they were. The cobbles felt tacky under his paws; some were lathered with spilt fizzy drink, while others were thickly rinded with food muck. Normally, these might consist of little snacks. But right now, Library Cat felt he hardly even had the energy to sniff them.
It must be made clear at this point, Human, that normally Library Cat felt perfectly comfortable in his own company. He would trot along with his mind stretched out alongside the warm embers of his thoughts. He would heat his soul by them and feel them diversify his emotions. They made him feel free and alive. But now his thoughts seemed to writhe like salted slugs, their churning a physical agony, and their twisted dance too ghastly to behold. Library Cat wanted rid of them. Loneliness started to tower up around him in great sheets of Perspex. He suddenly felt enclosed within the sheets. Life felt muted. Other Humans felt distant; even their chatter and coos of affection felt as if he was hearing them down a long, hollow pipe.
But the salted slugs writhed louder than ever in a froth of red, like the macabre death cries of a bloody war that no one else could see.
What’s going on?
As he turned the corner onto George IV Bridge, he noticed odd new thoughts rushing into his head that seemed to open and close absurdly like tiny little cocktail umbrellas. One such thought he had was to chase his tail, and that if he did, his mind would feel much better.
I outright refuse, thought Library Cat sternly to himself, the still-glimmering rational quarters of his brain kicking in. I’m not going down that road again. You can give that one up, Brain.
Library Cat had once had the misfortune to be struck down with a severe bout of tail chasing in his younger years. “Silly Cat!” the Humans would say, many of them laughing at the same time. “Probably got fleas… quit being daft!” What none of them seemed to understand was just how strangely addictive tail chasing was to the cat in question. Aside from knocking over various ceramic ornaments, tipping them precariously towards the fireside and setting many a plate of food flying, the tail-chasing cat in question would often be scolded by a proximate Human for “being so stoooooopid”. This was difficult to hear, when your brain was completely deluded and telling your paws and your mouth that your tail really was a mouse, when deep down you knew, really, something was wrong with your head but you couldn’t do anything about it, because your head was in charge of you, and yet it was short-circuiting like a snake devouring its own tail.
Nope, not going down that road again, thought Library Cat with conviction.
For a moment, at least, he felt better. The warm smell of butter and croissants hit his nostrils as he sauntered past the Elephant House café. Over in the graveyard behind Greyfriars Kirk, he could see a clutch of cats, skulking between the headstones. He wondered whether going to see them might shake off his foul mood; it would be a means of distraction after all. But something about the way the cats moved and hissed at each other suggested they were not especially nice cats, and so were probably not worth the time, and might make him feel even stranger. And he was simply not in the mood for a catnip tryst.
Home. Home would surely help. A warm radiator, some food, a read, and then maybe head for a nap in the turquoise chair and a trip up to the Towsery to hang out among like-minded cats. This would surely make things better. It was okay, he was in control.
Nearly there, he thought as he saw the blocky university buildings stubbing into the grey sky above. Focus, focus, there are many cats who are much worse off than me, I’m sure…
But the moment Library Cat attempted to gain perspective by recalling all the other suffering in the world, a great mushroom cloud of all the global misery seem to splurge up into his mind: homeless cats, abused cats, cats maltreated by their Humans, cats living in slums, cats teased by their owners, cats with horrible life-threatening diseases… sacrificed cats. He soon began to feel ill-justified in having ever felt happiness at all, as if his suffering so paled in comparison to all the other greater sufferings on earth that his feeling unhappy was, itself, utterly indulgent, and that all the pleasures he’d derived in life so far – the reading, the strokes from Humans, the catnip, the treats, the books – were all a great sham, like the thin flaky crust atop a planet that really only conceals the simmering, churning mass of hellish mantle underneath it, ready to bubble up the moment the crust ruptures, and that to believe anything else was pure delusion.
Library Cat slowed his pace and looked down at his paws advancing on the pavement. Left paw, Right paw, Black leg, White Leg, Left paw, Right paw, Black leg, White Leg. New thoughts were now coming into his mind. Weird thoughts. Strange thoughts…
Am I those things?
…grey thoughts, bitter thoughts; a whole fog of putrid, multi-coloured thoughts that twisted inexorably through his brain like fairy light cabling. He turned off Middle Meadow Walk towards George Square, the nettles around its perimeters seeming to rise up and grab the air like eerie sea anemones. He had never seen them in that way before, but now felt like he couldn’t see them in any other way. They frightened him. Things seemed out of focus.
And still the temptation to chase his tail…
Don’t be silly, Library Cat. You know it’s futile and would make things worse.
And then it was upon him. An odd smell met his nostrils, cadaverous and brown and heavy as lead. It struck Library Cat strange that a smell could be heavy and brown, but this smell was undoubtedly both these things. So nauseating was the smell that a mere wisp of it across his nostrils, disturbing the otherwise chill air, sent a deep heat into him, making him gag.
And then he saw it.
Between where he stood and the warm refuge of the library was the Black Dog. It had caught Library Cat’s scent.
Library Cat felt his pupils widen and his back arch as an unspeakable terror shot through his bones. His gaze locked onto the Black Dog, snapping only right and left when he was brave enough to look for a tree to climb, or a something to bolt beneath. There was nothing. All at once the Black Dog’s head turned. In the cold air, Library Cat saw two tiny yellow eyes, as small as pinpricks, that seemed to strobe bluey-yellow like tiny fusing light bulbs. The fur was smarmed with what seemed like grease, twisting it in all directions – sometimes up in a tuft, sometimes flat along its back, and sometimes back on itself. It had no collar and Library Cat could not tell its breed. In fact it seemed difficult to suggest it had any breed in it at all, crossed or otherwise. There was something not-of-this-earth about the Black Dog.