The Ghost Cat by Alex Howard

Author:Alex Howard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Black & White Publishing

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Grimalkin gazed at the tenements curving away along Marchmont Crescent. The turreted roofs of the upper flats speared up into a sky that was turning ominously dark. Rain was coming, and if Grimalkin knew one thing, it was that an Edinburgh summer downpour was a kind of meteorological purgatory that had to be experienced to be believed. Hailstones the size of tennis balls would arrive out of nowhere and pelt down so forcefully on his cat head that he’d feel dizzy and sick.

He upped his pace along Marchmont Crescent, on a mission. His fur gratefully insensitive to the first fat drops of rain, he tried to cast his mind back to 1935, when he had chanced upon Eilidh’s diary . . . Where was it she said she dreamed of living? Glenesk? Or was it Glenisla? I wonder if that Rockefeller lady made true on her promise of money? Grimalkin’s memories rolled in indistinctly upon themselves like curling scoops of butter under a passing knife.

It was Glen-something, I recall . . . thought Grimalkin as he glided through a flagstone wall and onto the narrow, cobbled Thirlestane Lane. He eyed the stable blocks along the length of the gloomy little road, wondering which one he had been born in back in 1887. Today, the stable doors were losing their paint, or had rotted through. Some stables had had their doors wrenched clean off, their insides made into little homes for motorcars who sheltered cosily among canisters of paraffin and diesel like little mice. On warmer evenings, the dairy further along would leave pails of milk for the street cats to lap at. Now it was shut up and derelict, its ribbed system of rafters and beams exposed like a skeleton to nesting birds and ivy.

Glen, glen . . . glen-something.

A childish yelp wafted up the road. Grimalkin turned his head to see the lady he had awoken to in the flat. She was leaning, one-handed, against a lamp post as her daughter was being sick into the gutter. “Oh, Isla, you silly, silly thing. Too much cake! Roy, take your sister over to Janis’s, she’ll have some chamomile tea.”

Isla! thought Grimalkin suddenly. Eilidh had wanted to move to Glenisla Gardens!

Grimalkin upped his pace and turned down the alley beside the cemetery just as the rain began to fall in torrents. Being a cartographer, his late master Mr Calvert always had plenty of maps strewn about the flat, meaning Grimalkin had picked up a surprising amount of knowledge of the local roads, streets and alleys without ever having walked them himself. He knew, for instance, that Glenisla Gardens was a crooked little road located in a hollow beyond Grange cemetery, which would be just beyond this little passageway where he was now. Tall mossy stone walls loomed either side of him as he upped his pace, trotting alongside a red postbox which still bore Queen Victoria’s insignia VR.

Halfway down, Grimalkin turned to his left, dissolving through the stone wall into an immaculately appointed back garden; each rhododendron

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