The Great Purr by Catherine Holm

Author:Catherine Holm
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: North Star Press of St. Cloud
Published: 2014-06-17T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13

Milo, Target, and Rashanna stood still as shadows frozen in time, staring at Kali Ma.

Target spoke first. “What are you doing here? Are you okay?”

Milo regarded Kali with narrowed eyes. A nagging feeling dogged him. She looked the same. Almost. What was real? What was unreal? Around them, the former glow around the trees continued to deaden into a gray pall. Rashanna’s tail twitched, making nervous errant paths across the leaf litter on the forest floor.

Kali came up to them, butting Target gently with her head, and Milo noticed that her fur was blurred like theirs.

“I was so scared. I felt something scratching my chin. It was so powerful. I wanted to give in. Something happened, and then I was here.”

“How long have you been here?”

She gave them a bland look, the cat shrug. “I have no idea. There’s no way to tell time here. It all moves differently.”

Milo noticed that Rashanna also watched Kali closely.

Kali washed her face. “I don’t remember anything other than being with you, and then being here. Where are we?”

“In the lowest depths of the UnderEarth.” Milo looked at the ground. Something made him not want Kali to see his face.

“Well, I’m hungry. And I smell good food this way.”

This was characteristic of Kali. Milo looked at Rashanna and Target and shrugged.

“Don’t you smell it? Don’t you?” Kali ignored the rest of them, pushed off through a new path in the forest. She did look a little fatter. Wherever she’d gone, she’d eaten well.

“Why not?” Rashanna whispered. “What do we have to lose?”

“What other choices do we have, you mean.” Target clipped his words.

“Sure. Or that.”

Milo saw the amused looked that Rashanna threw toward Target. Yin and Yang indeed. “Maybe we’ll learn something,” he said. “But be careful,” he added, keeping his words soft, for Target and Rashanna alone.

Kali pushed on ahead, jumping over deadwood snags of fallen aspen and spruce. Her added weight didn’t seem to slow her down. Ahead of them a grove of larch trees shimmered with the blurry outlines that seemed so common in these depths of the UnderEarth. The gray aura covered all the trees now, and the sedge grass. Milo glanced again at his own orange fur, found it still blurry. Rashanna cut a clear outline in the scene, somehow managing still to look ethereal even though each hair on her pelt now sharply defined itself.

Their paws tread over the whispery outlines of trees and conifer needles, and Milo realized that sometimes the ground felt soft and feathery, like a dream. Sometimes it remained solid as rock. The tactile sensation varied with no warning. He stepped on a clump of sedge grass that felt solid one moment, spongy the next. The effect was disconcerting, and Milo had to keep pushing the thought out of his mind that he would fall through something that only appeared to be solid ground. Target and Rashanna noticed it too, and they placed their paws carefully ahead of them, testing the ground, and trying to keep up with Kali, who seemed oblivious to the variations.

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