HALLOWEEN CATS AREN'T ALWAYS BLACK

...thought I'd share a true story about something that happened to me about 25 years ago during the witching season...

 Our house back then was on a dead end street with nothing but a strip of wild tangled bushes and trees separating the backyard from a busy highway.  The band of untamed brush hid the road and muffled the traffic noise and provided an ever-changing view outside my kitchen window.  There were wild flowers in the spring and summer, color-bright leaves in the fall, and a huge boulder just at the edge of the tree line where the neighborhood cats dozed in the sun or pounced down on unsuspecting mice and birds.  The rock was also a good place to take a book and idle away a summer afternoon. 

One bright fall day, right around Halloween, I was washing dishes and staring out the window when I noticed a white cat with long, dirty, shaggy fur and strange green eyes sitting on the boulder watching  me through the window.  I didn't recognize it as a neighborhood cat and even though it looked like a cat I used to have I knew it wasn't mine...I remember vividly the night my cat died.  

Some weeks previously I woke up in the middle of the night with a vague feeling of unease.  I had been reading before I fell asleep and my book was resting face down on my chest, so I closed it, put it on the head of the bed, and reached to turn off the light when I heard a noise.  It was a soft steady pounding sound and seemed to be coming from the back yard.  I got up, slid on my robe and slippers, and quietly followed the sound down the hall to the kitchen window. 

A full moon cast a soft light in the backyard, silhouetting someone  beside the boulder striking the ground with a pick in slow steady rhythm.  My eyes and my head were still clouded with sleep so the scene before me unfolded as if in slow motion making me unsure if I was awake or dreaming.  Then the pounding stopped and the silhouetted figure picked up something white off the rock and laid it in the hole hacked out with the pick. 

I watched, still feeling detached, as the dark figure covered the hole with dirt then stood up and lifted his head so his features were illuminated in the moonlight.  I could see tears streaming down his face...it was my son.   

Coming home late, he found our cat at the end of the street.  It had been hit by a car and was dead.  He didn't want to leave it there until morning so he brought it home and buried it in the backyard under the trees beside the rock.

 

 The strange shaggy white cat that showed up several weeks later only stayed around a couple of days but the surreal events of that night stayed with me and  "Pet Cemetery" by Stephen King, the book I was reading when I fell asleep, was the last book of its kind I ever read.

AT THE END OF THE DAY...Happy Halloween, everybody...